Original War (it’s on Gog and Steam btw)

It’s an RTS that had a pleasant spin on the genre. Your dudes and dudettes are all people with their own voices, characters and skillpoints (in theory, if you get a lot of them they kinda become samey but anyway). You have three character classes; soldiers who shoot shit, engineers who build shit and scientists who science shit and turn neanderthals into pack animals by taming them, they also heal people. You can freely send a soldier into the science lab, but their skills in science are probably so low that they wont help at all.

The “hook” of the game is that you only so many troops, you cant train them from a barracks, and you also have limited supplies which pop out every once in a while somewhere into the hostile wilderness. So every times you hear the noise of a supply drop, you have to scramble some dudes to go check it out, and because soldiers cant carry the boxes you need to have engineers there with em. You COULD send the engineers (or neanderthals) to fetch those alone, but if there’s a saber-toothed tiger or an enemy soldier they’re absolutely fucked.

You can have tanks and vehicles, but gas is also a limited resource that pops up every once in a while. That’s why we have solar baby! The feeling of putting your heavy tank outfitted with solar panels into combat only for it to run out of power and everyone in the group is fucking erased sure is something. Nothing dies instantly though, everyone is injured first and lose consciousness, you have a few minutes to heal them to rescue them. All of the vehicles also break down just before exploding and you can send your engineers to repair them.

The story is pretty interesting too, the premise is that you’re playing as an amerikkkan soldier being sent back in time because the soviet union invented time travel, but the only resource capable of powering them is all in Siberia. So the United Snakes sends your platoon over to mine the “Siberite” and take it over to Alaska. The time machine isnt very precise though, so that’s why your dudes and dudettes and supplies just appear out of thin air randomly. Now the funny thing is that when you get to the past it’s filled with soviet troops, who are there to mine the “Alaskite” and bring it over to Siberia.

There’s some decent characters and the amerikkkan campaign atleast has three endings depending on your choices. The soviets are portrayed in a sussy light though, so proceed with caution.

I played a demo of this game back in 2003 maybe and found it later in a bargain bin. I never see anyone talking about it, so I must assume that I’m the only one to have played it.