Your body is the army
Moduwar is a real-time strategy game where you play the alien creature itself. You control a Modu, and every part of it is something you command. The heart sits at the center and is the one thing you must keep alive. Everything else grows off it: you add tiles to the body, then place organs on those tiles. Each organ is a unit with a role, and the combination you build decides how your Modu fights.
Instead of training units from a menu, you evolve them. Split tiles off your body to make small, fast organ units that scout ahead and find the enemy early. Split more tiles to field a whole armada, and merge organs together to unlock abilities that a single organ does not have on its own. When a fight turns against you, pull everything back and merge it into the main body to hold your ground. The same creature can be spread thin across the map or folded into a single dense defense, so your shape at any moment is a real tactical decision.
Resources drive the growth, and the organs you choose to evolve should match what the battle needs. As the match goes on you gain access to more specialized organs, so your early creature and your late creature play differently.
Playing with friends
Moduwar supports online PvP, with multiplayer battles for up to 4 players where you can compete or cooperate. The setup is flexible enough that a group can pick a mode that suits the session. Arena Mode is for testing your best Modu builds against other players in tight battles. Classic Skirmish gives you a tactical match with customizable settings, which works well when a group wants to agree on the terms first. Survival Mode throws wave after wave of enemies at you if the group would rather hold out together than fight each other.
There is also a single-player campaign that follows a storyline with choice in it, so people in the group can play through it separately and compare where they ended up.
Before you start
The campaign has you commanding one of three distinct factions while you unlock new organ combinations and evolving abilities. Expect a learning curve around planning your body: what you grow, where you grow it, and when you split it apart. Protecting the heart is the constant pressure underneath every decision, since losing it ends everything it was holding together.
The setting is Arkadia, an alien ecosystem under siege. The Humans and the Chimera have enslaved the native Modu and turned them into living weapons for the ERE. Your choices in the campaign determine the fate of the life on Arkadia, so the story is worth paying attention to between battles. The game is in Early Access, so content and balance can shift as it develops.