A while ago we posted a hands-on preview of Fishtank Interactive's SWINE where pigs and rabbits have a bad attitude and decide to get on each other's nerves to result on a big war.
We decided that this game might really be something if the developers wouldn't screw things up. Let's see how this game has evolved since beta-stage.

The story is still the same, the pigs invade Carrotland and you can choose whether you want to be a rabbit and defend your country or whether you would rather play as a vicious pig and start conquering those carrot-eating pests' land.

The game uses a real 3D engine and as you should expect you can zoom in and out although zooming in doesn't really make any sense to me unless you want to check out the nice graphics from closer by.

The graphics are a bit cartoon-like which supports the idea of the game really well since humor is a big part of SWINE.

Rabbits and Pigs will constantly comment on things that are happening and when a unit is blown up, you'll see the ghost of the driver flying away to never harrass you again.

The comment-part is really funny in the beginning, but after a while it can start to get boring aswell. Maybe there's an option to turn it off, but since I got a German gold master (without manual) I didn't find it and my German isn't good enough to understand everything that's being said.

SWINE isn't your average real-time strategy game in any way. Unlike with games like Command&Conquer you don't have to collect "ore" or anything to get money to build more units and building. The idea here is that for each mission you select some units (tanks and such) depending on how much money you have. During the mission you'll get strategy points and with those you'll be able to buy some additional units.

Taking care of your units is therefor very important. You can also buy a towing truck that can drag along a resource trailer. Those trailers can have a repairbay (never forget this one, you'll always be able to use it), extra fuel or ammo.

Some units also have special abilities like digging themselves in or tanks that nail themselves to the ground, increasing their range of fire.

The gameplay is pretty good although I must say that the already released patch is a defenite must. While playing, I noticed several graphical bugs which really spoiled the game, but after installation of the patch most of them were gone.
Also the system requirements are pretty high. Even on my Athlon 1.4 Ghz with 256 Mb and GeForce DDR the units sometimes started to drive so slow when in the proximity of other units that I wanted to give them a kick in the ass (even on fast forward mode which increases the game's speed).

I must say that S.W.I.N.E. is a very well-crafted game (although you need to patch before being able to play reasonably bugfree) but I'm a bit disappointed about the fact that the beta ran more fluent on my system than the full version does. This is ofcourse because loads of features like rain, water, etc have been added and are pretty well done in with the 3D engine (better than Emperor in any case).

Overall I quite liked S.W.I.N.E. with it's humor and different gameplay but also got pretty fast bored with it. The disadvantage of having funny comments by your units for instance is that these comments become boring really fast.

I think you'll have to decide for yourself whether you'ld want to buy S.W.I.N.E. or not since it will depend hugely on personal taste and that's something no-one can discuss on.