Gaming

Universe At War - Choose Your Side

Seeing as it was Petroglyph’s (composed of ex-westwood employees who made the command and conquer series) first original, own ip based game, I was pretty interested in the game for quite some time. After, finally getting a chance to play this it has been a mixed bag. Throughout the single player campaign you will be constantly be reminded of two contrasting things - how much original, interesting stuff is there in the game and how much polish it lacks.

Talking about the interesting stuff each race felt fun and unique to play. Walkers are one of the most interesting units in any rts ever. The game has three races - The evil Heirachy, their arch rival race - Novus and the Saviour race - Masari. all of these units have their distinct weakness and strengths which you will need to use to master them full. It’s as much fun to play using the Walkers and wreaking havoc on your enemies as it is using your forces effectively to take them down (gives a great feeling of accomplishment). Other races are also many interesting dynamics. Building up the control lines network intelligently of Novus and using them to quickly move around is really awesome. Gives you a full control of the battlefield. The Masari, though a bit conventional, also had interesting elements like using light/dark modes as per requirements . In short all the factions offer a lot of interesting options and and area lot of fun to play

Moving to the other aspect the of the game, that is the lack of polish. The units are difficult to control and use. It feels clunky to to move the units around and the gameplay suffers quite a bit because of that. It’s also pretty difficult frustrating to do simple stuff to manage unit groups, see the units currently selected etc. Camera controls are similarly awkward. You cannot move around the camera easily to see the battlefield as you want. Due to these problems the gameplay feels a bit slow pace and micro becomes pretty difficult. There are also a few bugs in the the game, one especially frustrating bug was crashing after 10 secs of loading saved game (was later on fixed in a patch - so this patch could be essential for some)

The single player campaign is pretty standard save the world kind of stuff although the missions for each factions themselves are pretty interesting. The story being pretty simple progresses nicely and is decent enough to provide enough motivation to finish the game. The last faction campaign consists of conquer the world types of missions where you conquer one territory after other, and you can go by shortest rote or take your time by first controlling all the neighboring territories. This mode though pretty simple helps keeping the thing fresh

Didn’t play a lot of multiplayer because of games for windows crap, but from what I played the game seems to have lots of interesting strategic options. It has the standard skirmish mode and also the conquer the world mode where players will be battling over the territories in the world map and fighting rts style in the territory mas

Graphics are decent and the unit art design is also good. The various units like walkers and other heirachy machines really have a menacing and brutal mechanized look which is suits them perfectly. The Novus shiny and bright look makes them a good contrast to Heirachy and Masari’s radiating look also suits them pretty well

It felt like a shame that while the game offers original stuff while at the same time it forgets to offer basic stuff which are common in most of the rts nowadays

Here’s a trailer for you gamies

© 2008 kenpachi Gamer.