Dying Breed is an upcoming real-time strategy game developed by Sarnayer and published by MicroProse, set in an alternate timeline following the Second World War in which undead hordes, underground monsters, and retro-futuristic technology have made an already catastrophic period of history considerably worse. The release date is unannounced. What has been shown looks like a deliberate attempt to reconstruct the classical RTS formula that defined the 1990s and has been largely absent since.
The setting combines conventional military hardware with science fiction and horror elements. Infantry, vehicles, aircraft, and naval units share the battlefield with zombies and creatures that would not be out of place in a B-movie from the era the game is clearly drawing on. The resource system uses two materials: Substance D, a blue mineral harvested from deposits scattered across maps, and energy generated through power plant construction. The tech tree gates more powerful unit types behind investment, which means early-game decisions about where to spend resources have consequences that compound as matches develop. The structure is familiar to anyone who spent time with Command & Conquer or Warcraft in the 1990s, and Sarnayer are not pretending otherwise.
The single-player campaign runs to fifteen missions across varied environments, from frozen tundras to desert biomes, following an international task force attempting to contain the chaos. FMV cutscenes appear between missions, a deliberate nod to the production style that defined the era the game is drawing from. Notable characters include Lieutenant Franco and Private Yama, lending the campaign enough personality to carry the narrative between engagements. Mission design introduces mechanics progressively, with early stages covering fundamentals before later missions demand fluency across the full unit roster. The complete campaign runs to approximately fifteen hours, with side objectives and difficulty settings extending that further.
Beyond the campaign, skirmish mode supports matches against AI across ten maps with adjustable settings covering starting funds, resources, and unit configurations. Challenge missions add constrained scenarios, limited unit counts, defensive holds against sustained assault, that kind of thing. Replay support allows post-match review.
The unit roster exceeds fifty across both factions, with a rock-paper-scissors counter system underpinning combat decisions. Effective play requires map control for resource access, positioning during engagements, and the kind of micro that separates competent RTS players from good ones. Sarnayer have described their design goal as recapturing the balance between depth and accessibility that characterised the early Command & Conquer games, which is either an accurate summary of what they have built or the optimistic self-assessment of a developer who has not finished building it yet.
The aesthetic is pixel art with detailed unit models and destructible environments. The soundtrack is described as electro-rock with deliberate callbacks to Hell March and its contemporaries, and players can toggle between two music options. Performance targets are modest by design, with the minimum specification accessible enough to run on integrated graphics.
Post-launch support is planned, with free updates covering additional campaign missions, new units, and quality-of-life improvements. MicroProse’s involvement as publisher gives the project a distribution platform with genuine heritage in this genre, which counts for something.
Dying Breed has a release date to be confirmed. Wishlist it on Steam.
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