Tri Level Battlefield

Sky, earth, and underground

As you can see from the screenshots, Metal Fatigue is an isometric perspective RTS game, but the action takes place on three distinct levels. Primarily you'll be worrying about what's happening on the ground. It's on the ground where you'll be keeping most of your structures and fighting many of your battles. You'll also be warring over lava wells that gather energy (money) on the ground. However, fighting also takes place up on orbital platforms in the sky. You'll use teleporters to get most of your combots and units up there but if you have jetpack equipped combots they can get from sky to ground and platform to platform without any help. In the sky you can make solar collectors to get more energy (money) for your economy. Finally there's an underground level which also houses lava pits for energy. Drills must be used to tunnel around, and it is possible to tunnel into an enemy area and use their elevators to do a surprise raid.

Bots wearing sneakers?

Battle at the chokepoint

Keeping track of it all

In order to keep track of everything, you can bring up three minimaps that show you the sky level, the ground, and the underground levels. These can be displayed singly or all at once. So while Metal Fatigue doesn't give you 3D freedom in the way that Homeworld will, the three level battlefield means that you can't become too narrow and focused on one aspect of the war - careless players will get bum rushed from above and below. Bear in mind though that combots are not the only units in Metal Fatigue - there's a good selection of tanks, bombers, artillery, air to air fighters, and stationary towers that also share in the battle. Combots are the focus of any good attacking force, but the other units will be needed for support purposes. You'll use energy to build all these weapons but you'll also need cryo farms to produce the manpower to pilot all these vehicles.

More bottleneck action

No idea what these are