I could claim that I love real-time strategy games for their fast-paced decision-making. But what I truly love is building massive armies and wreaking havoc on an apocalyptic scale. So when I saw the trailer for Horu (via RPS), an in-development RTS that promises “hundreds of thousands of units” on screen, it went on the wishlist faster than you can say ‘Zerg Rush’.
Horu is an upcoming strategy game inspired by Total War and Star Wars: Empire at War, aiming to blend the colossal battles of the former with the galaxy-scale strategy of the latter. It challenges players to establish their own interstellar empire, building vast space fleets and huge land armies to assume ultimate dominion of the cosmos.
While it’s the spectacle of Horu that caught my attention, with clouds of spaceships trading laser fire and oceans of little men getting obliterated by artillery, there are a couple of more specific ideas and mechanics that also sound deeply exciting. Unlike the games that inspired it, Horu aspires to be fully real-time, with battles playing out simultaneously across the solar system. This includes both land and space battles, letting you do things like punch your dropships through an enemy’s orbital fleet to land an army on the surface while the battle in space rages on.
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This sounds rad, but also like it might be challenging to keep track of. Thankfully, Horu promises a few mechanics to keep the scale manageable. This includes a “drop zone system” that lets you assign a drop zone on a planet and queue up a set of orders, which the assigned army will then carry out automatically.
Other planned features include world colonisation and development, the ability to build spy networks and conduct espionage missions, space magic that’ll let you cast devastating spells on the battlefield, and a fully simulated economy and research tree. There’s even a system that lets you create boarding parties to take control of enemy ships and add them to your fleet.
All of this built by a solo dev who goes by GlassBeaver, who build his own custom engine to develop the game. Development has been underway for several years, but GlassBeaver has now taken the game to Kickstarter “to help fun the remaining assets, sound and music”. The campaign is already halfway to reaching its goal of £16,685, so it looks likely to get over the finish line.
There’s no specific release date for Horu yet, but GlassBeaver plans for the game to launch at the end of 2027. The next twelve months are shaping up to be big for space strategy more broadly, with Dawn of War 4 due to launch in December, and Total War: Warhammer 40,000 expected sometime next year.
