It’s nice to have a game that just tells you what it is from the off, without a crappy subtitle plonked on to give it a disproportionate sense of grandeur. There’s no Redemption, Revelation or erm, Revengeance here, just a bloody mad dash for the black stuff (no, not Bovril).
Oil Rush has instead been given the Kojima-esque strap of Naval Strategy Game, so you can probably guess it’s a strategy game set at sea, a post-apocalyptic sea to be precise, inspired in equal parts by Command & Conquer and seminal (hahaha) Kevin Costner vehicle Waterworld.
Funnily enough, by wild happenstance, you play a chap called Kevin, an impressively dour Australian whose actor doesn’t so much phone it in as send a poorly spelled text message. To the wrong person. Kevin gets bossed around by the Commander, who tells him to sort out all kinds of seafaring shenanigans as explosively as possible.
Oil Rush maybe oversimplifies things, and takes out a load of the micromanagement (you can’t send singular units out to battle, instead sending either 25%, 50% or 100% of your forces on each base) and the presentation is bloody appalling, but it’s actually quite fun once you get to the game proper. It’s a lot faster than other strategy games, with none of the hunkering down or base building usually required. It looks pretty nice too.
Whether or not it’s worth buying depends just on how badly you think you need another military strategy game. Who knows, maybe it’s worth it if you really like water or something.
Oil Rush then. It’s pretty sli-(gunshot)
