By: Brian Crecente

Stow the pitchforks, turns out all of that talk about Left Behind: Eternal Forces being a disguised hate-game is a bunch of crap. I just spent a few hours meeting with some of the Left Behind Games folks about their religion-themed real-time strategy title, and while it's chockfull of subtle Christian messaging and even some overt proselytizing, it's not at all about running around killing heathens and metrosexuals.

The plan is for the game to include 40 missions based loosely on the goings-on of the third, fourth and fifth books of the Left Behind series. Essentially, you start the game, which is set in New York City, with a third of the population ascended to heaven and the rest of the planet divided into three groups: the Tribulation Force (good guys), the Global Community Peacekeepers (bad guys) and neutral, undecided people.

Unlike with most RTS titles, the units in Eternal Forces are individual people instead of clusters or squads of people.

Greg Bauman, marketing manager and associate producer for the game, said that each of these people have their own life and faith back-stories. All said, there are 350 or so stories written for the characters in the game, Bauman said.

A character's attributes include both health and spirit. To take out a Global Community Peacekeepers, lead by the Antichrist, you can either kill them or convert them. While killing them takes them out of the picture, you lose one point from your score and the unit you have doing the killing loses some of their spirit. If you convert the person, they join your side and you gain two points.

Conversions are done by pumping up a person's spirit score to above 60. If a person's spirit drops below 40 they join the bad guys, anything in between and the person is neutral. You convert a person by preaching at them (or bad-mouthing them) with special units. Bauman said that your units' spirt drops over time if left unattended, so you have to baby-sit them You also have to look out for your units' health and food needs.

Once you convert a person to your army, you can train them to become one of several different classes, like a medic, soldier or builder. Each of these units can be upgraded. Training and resources are garnered through buildings. Since the game takes place in New York City, you don't actually build new structures, but convert them to your needs with builder units.

If you strip the religion out of the game, you're left with a real-time strategy title with some very interesting twists in it. First is the concept that killing affects armies differently.

Because killing a person lowers a unit's spirit value, doing so can hurt a Tribulation soldier, but help a Global Community Peacekeeper.

To help balance this out, Left Behind Games threw in demons.

The computer-controlled demons appear if the GCP player's spirit remains low for too long. Of course, to recruit and maintain GCP units you need to keep your spirit low. So a demon is bound to pop up eventually. Initially, this may seem like a good thing, because the first thing a demon does it attack the Tribulation units. But once they're gone it tears into the GCP units as well and it's nearly impossible to kill them. The best way to deal with a demon is to use preachers, which of course the GCP forces don't have.

Kind of a cool concept.

I also find the concept of spiritual warfare very interesting. As Bauman explains it, if pulled off correctly it will add a new level of strategy to the game. Powerfully spirited units will be able to quickly convert well-armed bad guys. Conversely, the very spiritual characters tend to move slower and are very bad at physical combat so they can be sniped by soldiers.

There's no way for me to say if this game, taken outside of its bible-thumping, is fun. I've always believed that you can't review an RTS without spending a considerable amount of time with it. This genre is all about careful balance and nuance. But from what I saw, the game offers decent graphics, but may be a bit too shallow to fully engage hard-core strategy gamers.

While I think the mechanics are interesting, this is one of those games, like most RTS, that will live or die online.

It's only in the online portion of the game, which supports up to eight players, that you can play the bad guys and it is online where people will spend most of their time with the game, Bauman says.

I also talked to Bauman and Jeffrey Frichner, president of the developer, about some of the deeper implications of the game. I applaud the effort of any game designer to inject deeper meaning in a game, but at the same time it's easy to wonder just what sort of messages they will include.

Bauman says the goal of the game is threefold: To entertain, to get people to think about God and to get people to talk about God. The game, which has plenty of death, but no blood, is geared toward gamers 13 to 34, he said, adding that pre-sales at stores like Gamestop have been "good." (The game is shipping with a number of different SKUs. Some will include a free bible, others a free copy of the first book and still others cheat codes.)

I asked them how they choose who to classify as the "bad guys" of the game, while writing their back stories. Did they have "bad" characters with back stories that described the person as being gay or maybe having had an abortion?

Bauman said no, they didn't.

The idea, he said, was to develop archetypes that people could identify with. I had him click on a bad guy I selected randomly in the game. Reading through the five or six paragraph-long life story, the guy came off as a workaholic who just didn't have time for religion. His faith story described how he joined the Global Community Peacekeepers. The guy saw the group as a movement that hoped to bring peace to the world through unification and just wanted to start out with them on the ground floor.

Bauman said that most of the "bad guy" life stories were that innocuous.

While the game has a very obvious message it's pushing, the version I saw didn't really beat your over the head with it. The only scripture in the game comes in the form of occasional power-ups. You find a scroll, read a line of scripture and an angel appears to bestow increased spirituality or some other buff.

Between each mission there is also a page that pops up with a Christian message and some Christian music. The one I saw talked about the second-coming and how it's real. The screen does have a button on it that lets you skip right back to gameplay.

Both Frichner and Bauman say they see video games as a new vehicle, a newly discovered art form that can be used to spread their particular message. It's funny hearing a group, often associated with being anti-games, defending video games the same way companies like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft have been doing for years.

This is the sort of game that players need to embrace, not for the message or even for the gameplay, but because it helps evelop the detractors which is the obvious and inevitable outcome to any new media cultural backlash.