Although you may not know it, the multiplayer focused first person shooter genre is actually around two years old. While Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena did a great job of furthering the genre and broadening its audience, Tribes started this initially quiet revolution almost two years ago now. But oddly enough, other genres have yet to follow this lead by shifting focus away from single player (possibly with a little multiplayer on the side) and onto multiplayer. Until now, that is. Enter Ethermoon and their multiplayer-only real time strategy, Strifeshadow.

Strifeshadow allows you to play as one of three different races – the Dark Elves, the Accursed and the… well, they've actually yet to announce the third race and although there's mention of Humans and Light Elves in the stories on their pages, it's anyone's guess who the third race will actually be. Ethermoon have made it clear that they're strongly focusing on making the races very different from one another by giving them each unique units and play styles. To add even further tactical depth to the gameplay they've devised what they call a “two and a half” resource system. Aether is a crucial resource for structure and unit construction, but rather than being harvested or mined it is drawn from the ground by Aether towers. To get the Aether back to base for future use, players will have to construct a series of Aether Towers leading back to their base.

The other “one and a half” of this resource system is a metal called Ikon which is useful for building certain units. However, if you want to start building units that can cast spells and the like, you'll need to switch a mine over to producing Arikon, a magical derivative of Ikon. Overall, this resource gathering system is intended to make play more interesting and of course more fun. The system encourages the enemy to raid your resources, particularly Aether as Aether Towers will be quite vulnerable and open to attack. In turn, you'll have to carefully defend your vulnerable mines and Aether Towers while deciding how to best spend your gathered resources and what type of metal Ikon your mines should be producing.