Universe At War: Earth Assault

Sep. 02, 2008

I'm beginning to run out of genres to rent. So I tried out something really crazy - an RTS for consoles. Yes, a genre that is dominated by mouse control, but on a 360. This is going to hurt.

Category

RTS Sans Mouse

Pros

• The first walker you fight is a beast - that it's so much larger than anything else makes a powerful impression. Not only that, but the multiple hit points of the walker makes battles with it interesting.
• There are interesting differences between the races, so far as I could see.
• Not having to direct resource gathering yourself is great.
• This game steals from every RTS you've ever played before, but that means it has a lot of good elements from other RTSes in it.
• The method for selecting abilities is genius, and makes it easy to command mixed unit armies and their special abilities.

Cons

• For a game that places the story in a central location, it's pretty... hackneyed and stilted. Americans fighting to save the president, aliens who consume planets for resources, other aliens who are the faithful defenders of the universe, and a lonely alien with an obvious romantic attraction to the first human she sees. It's somewhat interesting, but mostly just feels cliched.
• In this game, there is an attack which the jets use which makes them spin around shooting in all directions called the Jet Blossom. The Last Starfighter called, it wants its Death Blossom back.
• Tutorial took 15 minutes... I'm beginning to think that the shorter the tutorial, the better, because I'm getting pretty sick of tutorials. I think the main crime of this one is that I got things faster than it expected, but it would wait for me anyways.
• The game does a surprisingly good job of letting you control the battlefield via joystick, but ultimately it is still inferior to the mouse. I kept clicking on characters or buildings only to miss, and accidentally tell my whole army to stop what they are doing and go over to another location. Selecting your whole army at once is easy, but selecting pieces is a bitch. The early missions are basically the RTS equivalent of bunch-ball, but later missions will be really hard with these controls.
• This game steals from every RTS you've ever played before, meaning a lot of the mechanics feel old.

Verdict

It was a commendable effort to make the game work for console controls, but I would only keep playing this game on the PC.