War of the Animals
Unfortunately, Stormregion didn’t take the premise as far as they could have. Once you take control of the rabbits or pigs and start fighting battles, you find that the animals use a variety of tanks and vehicles for their fighting needs, and that their mission objectives are things like capturing oil derricks or defending water holes or ransacking cities. That is, aside from the comments made by the pigs and rabbits during gameplay, S.W.I.N.E. isn’t much different from dozens of other real-time strategy games on the market. I think Stormregion would have been better off if they had used units that actually look like rabbits and pigs instead of anonymous tanks (how about a rabbit infantry unit with a carrot-tipped spear?) and if the territory in the game had been something like a farm instead of the standard real-time strategy locales.
On a brighter note, the graphics for S.W.I.N.E. are pretty good. Stormregion did an excellent job with the mission maps. The maps are structured well, there is nice variety to the terrain, and there is lots of good eyecandy sprinkled about, from different looking buildings and houses in the cities, to odd looking skeletons in the deserts, to funny billboards making fun of the pigs’ General Iron Tusk in one of the later missions. Plus, the units are modeled well, and even though they’re all tank-like vehicles, they look different enough so they’re easy to tell apart. And Stormregion put in a lot of nice details with the units. Vehicles look more battle worn as they gain experience, when a unit is killed a ghost image of the driver appears over it, and sometimes a rocket launcher shoots a carrot instead of a rocket (but it does the same damage). Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, even with the attention to detail, and even with polygon counts around 100,000, the 3D engine ran well on my machine, even though it’s under the recommended system requirements.
Lastly, Stormregion did a nice job with the sounds, and they paid as much attention to detail here as they did with the graphics. So, for example, when you select a unit, the acknowledgement you hear is random based on things like the time of day, the health of the unit, and even the terrain for the map. Plus, there is a large variety of taunts and jibes that the rabbits and pigs say to each other, and the voice acting is surprisingly good (and it might interest you to know that rabbits speak with a French accent while pigs speak with something resembling a Russian accent). There is even some nice, upbeat music included with the game, but it is only heard between missions, not during them.