Glest is a game that is both so easy and so hard to describe. Some say that the game is far too similar to WarCraft 3. To them, I say 'bide your time'.

This is a game that has amazing potential and, by the look of it, some very skilled people behind it. Another good point is that it's open source and it's not too difficult to edit the .ini files to your liking. The maps themselves are a mixed bag, but the texture packs have been well made and there are quite a few other past the default 'Winter Forest' and 'Forest'.

Now to the game itself. It is a skirmish-based game that plays well against the AI and better against other people. There is no campaign (As of yet) but the skirmishes provide just enough to wait until there is more in this game. There may only be two sides and around 10 units, but these are early days yet. The units that are in the game are pretty well balanced, although I must say that it is easy to send in a whole fleet of archers to the enemy base which will completely wipe it out, in a style similar to the early Command and Conquer 'tank rushes'.

One aspect that I like in a strangely sadistic way is that, if need be, you can train your own units on each other. I have got more than one set of around 10 archers (that's easily enough to win) and killed 5 peasants with each, making them elite soldiers. I quite like this, although it is a bit crazy, and it is absolutely hilarious to see your enemy do this when you sneak a unit into their land.

Another thing I like, is the way that some of the soldiers can build other units, such as siege towers, or even better: late-medieval death-robots. Those are maybe the best units that you could ever even begin to think of, thumbs up to the developers for that.

One of the only bad things is that the magical side is a bit tedious (so far anyway) and they rely on energy to fight. This is one of the reasons why the technologists' archers will win pretty much every time. On the other hand, their attacks are powerful and their buildings look pretty nice.

So yes, my score. At this point it is hard to grade it, as some people will demand that I give it a 5 rating and others a 1 or 2. I will say that due to the massive potential and already good community addons, as well as the good gameplay it gets a 3.6 mark. If the gameplay was less repetitive, it would be 4-5ish, but as it stands a lot of the score is potential and community based.