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By Keith B (24th Sep 2008)

Real Time Strategy games on consoles aren’t normally the best fare, particularly if you’re handy with a keyboard and mouse and used to being able to create control groups of a variety of different vehicles and troops. Maybe I should rephrase that: consoles aren’t the best platforms for RTS games because of the control systems. While first person shooters evolved magically on consoles, the RTS has, and is, struggling.

It’s certainly not the end of the world but I’ve always thought that the above was true, and Universe at War does nothing to change my mind. Yes, it’s original and yes, many of the units have interesting properties, but it’s nothing new and the lack of originality is compounded by some terrible technical issues. Throw in the fact that the 360 version landed months after the PC one and contains many of the same flaws, this is never going to set the world afire.

The basic story, which could have done with some serious work, is this: the humans are sitting alone on earth when suddenly an army arrives from space (The Hierarchy) and starts harvesting people and structures as they spread out across the globe. Hot on their heels, and equally unknown to the humans, come another alien race (Novus), who apparently hunt the Hierarchy down. It’s never entirely clear why this is except for some loosely used terms about the Novus being the antibiotics of the galaxy. Needless to say, the humans are little more than cannon fodder between these two races.

Structurally, each army offers some genuinely unique approaches to gameplay. Where the Hierarchy construct massive walker units that take some serious firepower to disable, Novus favour rapid deployment and a wider range of units.

Your first assignment (for the game takes you on a whistlestop tour of the three races, not including humans - another ancient race is awakened from the earth conflict) is using the Novus. The introduction of this race of machines is vague, with practically no back story as to how a race of sentient machines end up flying around the galaxy exterminating another race. I’d imagine a Galactic Government, or other such entity that surely that must exist in this future of interdimensional travel, would have something to say about that. But they don’t and here we are, so let’s keep going.

Novus’ ‘big thing’ is using a network of, for lack of a better word, electricity pylons to move units around as pure energy, meaning as long as you have the network in place, you can move troops to any given spot as quick as you like. Vehicles can’t do it but waves of troops spilling out a pylon adjacent the enemy is a satisfying sight. The only problem is that the foes you face while Novus, the Heirarchy, aren’t afraid of troops because they have 20-storey tall walkers that roam the map, and hence you spend more time building tanks and sending them up as waves, a tactic that’s been alive since Command & Conquer.

Once you move past the Novus campaign (seven levels) you get to use the Heirarchy, and the opportunity to get some of those aforementioned walkers out on the map. Each walker has fixed hard points and also tends to serve as structures for the purpose of branching out on the in-game tech tree. So when you build one, you get to pick what you want to put on each of the hardpoints, an interesting touch. From Mass Cannons and plasma turrets through to things that reduce the costs of units made on the walker (they can construct troops or vehicles), the array is well structured, but because the walker is attacked using these hardpoints the things you build vanish just as quickly. I joke not when I say that I’ve sat for 10 minutes just building cannons on the walker because they’re being continually shot off, but because it has such massive hit points, it won’t die.

The third race I’ll leave alone but suffice to say they’re going to be on the sides of the humans because it just wouldn’t be sporting not to be. And that’s the basic idea of the game and its units and races. Now for the reasons it’s poor.

I’ve already mentioned the piss-weak tale but there’s more, because the wispy web of stuff I assume was supposed to be story (but kept reminding me of the kid I used to hate up the street from me as a kid and wanted to beat him, funnily enough) introduce you to characters that not only lack depth, they also present some interesting questions themselves. For example, if the races have the power to travel across the galaxy waging never ending war on each other, then why does nobody remember anything about the mysterious third race, considering they only vanished 10,000 years ago? I mean, the human race can’t travel across space but we’ve a fair idea of what happened to the dinosaurs.

Or take the characters. Each race has three main people you’ll relate to, and they are all - in personality - clones of each other. The general for Novus that wants to help the humans; the general for the Hierarchy that respects the humans and now wants to stop what he’s doing despite being the ‘destroyer of 1,000 worlds’. Or the ruthless commander who does nothing but goad the generals into making a move in some plot twists as subtle as a hammer to the face.

Finally, we have some galling technological issues too. When you lose a map, you get presented with some simple options: A to restart, B to quit. Except hitting A is no guarantee you’ll get to replay, because about half the time, the game got stuck. And get this – the only way I could get it ‘unstuck’ was to bring out the Gamerscore blade which kicked the sound back in, and then after maybe five minutes, the game restarted. Or the shoddy balance issues where the map ends when one of your leaders is destroyed, meaning you have to play ‘protect the hero’ at all times, which can be difficult when you’re trying to pick them out of the crowd.

Technical issues mean this will never be a success on consoles, and it doesn’t deserve to be. A poor effort.