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By Lachlan (8th Apr 2008)

Back in the days of the Cold War, alien invasion was the gold standard for Worst Thing That Could Possibly Happen. But as an allegory for foreign takeover, the threat of flying saucers and death-ray annihilation is somewhat diminished when the worst your ideological opponents can manage is a mass mail-out of poorly taped cave videos. Predictably, there’s been a significant drop in just how scary we find the prospect of little green men running wild in the streets of our cities.

Throwing heavy-handed analysis over the side, the opening missions of Universe at War’s story campaign cast you headlong into an almost nostalgic fight for survival against an extraterrestrial onslaught. It’s like something from the kind of screenplay Michael Bay might like to try his hand at filming, complete with tough talking marines mounting a desperate rescue of the President, and flying saucers whizzing around Washington DC.

Petroglyph Studio’s latest release has Earth as the flashpoint for a conflict involving not one, but three different alien races. While the US army serves as the protagonists for the introductory missions, they are quickly set aside in favour of a race of sentient, anime-inspired machines called the Novus. The two join forces to fight the bad guys, a genocidal bunch known as the Hierarchy, whose aesthetic draws on equal parts of Independence Day, and War of the Worlds. Rounding off this regular party bus of alien monstrosities are the Masari, an ancient race who probably had a hand in building the pyramids, that is, if their art design is anything to go by.

The inherent campiness of the situation is quite intentional, creating an over-the-top backdrop for the single-player campaign. The story proper concerns the invasion of Earth by the Hierarchy, who roll over all human resistance. The Novus intercede on our behalf, with the ensuing fracas waking the dormant Masari, who of course have no option but to join in on the destruction.

Universe at War draws on a wealth of source material, reflected both in the single-player plot, and the design of individual units. The Novus hero unit has a missile-pod special attack that looks like it was lifted straight from an episode of Robotech. The Hierarchy’s basic infantry unit shoots green lasers, which turn the human civilians that populate each level into little piles of bones, reminiscent of the Martian weaponry from Mars Attacks.

Once the game begins, the first problem to present itself is the camera interface. It simply doesn’t pull back far enough. Battles feel like they’re occurring on several screens at once, and require some serious scrolling to keep up with. Some of the individual units occupy way too much real estate – a single Hierarchy walker can take up a quarter of the screen all on its own.

While the Hierarchy’s walkers and the hero units look fantastic, some of the other models just don’t stack up, even compared to titles released three or four years ago. When I went looking for a way to bump up the level of detail, I was surprised to discover that the game had already defaulted to the highest possible graphical settings. Nothing looks all that bad, but the level of detail in individual units hardly measures up to the standard set by Company of Heroes, a title which came out in 2006.

The basic interface is immediately familiar to anybody who has ever played an RTS before, but each faction has vastly different micro-management and resource gathering mechanics. A trip through the tutorial levels helped familiarise me with the basics, but by this time I’d already played through half the Novus campaign without making use of half there unique mechanics. Innovation is fine, but it needs to be balanced out with an intuitive interface.

For an RTS game to have three factions that play quite differently from one another was a genre-reinventing twist when it was first introduced, back in the days of 2D bitmaps and Windows 95. And like all good, easy-to-implement pieces of game design, it became a cliché within a few short years of Starcraft’s release. Giving the player enough points of reference, versus giving them a wildly different game experience depending on their choice of faction is a fine line to walk, and unfortunately Universe at War makes a few frustrating pitfalls along the way.

We come back to games primarily because of the feedback they offer us on our abilities, adaptability and skill. When it comes down to it, Peggle is basically a game about bouncing a little silver ball into a bucket, yet it’s more addictive than chocolate-coated crack. You know you’re doing well because the game tells you so. At the other end of the complexity scale lie RTS games like World in Conflict. Here, you’re working with a completely different set of stimulus and rules, yet the game keeps you hooked for the same reason as Peggle – the task you have been set is readily apparent, as is how you are progressing towards the completion of that task.

The major problem I had with Universe at War came down to the fact that there was just too many times I wasn’t being given the feedback or information that I needed to effectively play the game. I often lost matches and failed missions for no clear reason, simply because I hadn’t noticed something going on in some corner of the map. Playing through the same missions over and over, I started looking for ways to avoid situations that would cause me to lose.

The decision to use the Windows Live framework for Universe at War’s multiplayer component causes more problems for PC gamers. While the Xbox-style achievements add something extra to game play, finding somebody to play against online is a difficult task, made even more so by the lack of cross-platform play.

Complaints and occasional frustration aside, Universe at War has a lot of content to sift through, some interesting game types and a few areas of real innovation. If you’re tired of the last few excellent RTS titles that have come out for the PC, then Universe at War could be a fun distraction. It’s just a pity it didn’t receive the extra polish it would have taken to turn this title into something truly great.