Universe at War: Earth Assault Xbox 360

4/10

The good:
Aliens as main characters
Three distinctive campaigns
Overly large walking robots

The bad:
Clearly ported to console for scale rather than demand
No pinpoint control
Terrible menus and displays
Flatlining live community


Just think about it for a second: the number of person-hours that Petroglyph must have put in to make a tightly controlled RTS for the console world. Crucial hours, for a company that is still a mere shadow of the all Command-and-Conquering Westwood that birthed it. All that belly aching over the replacement of hot keys, unit selection, map movement. Optimising engines, streaming off disk. Integration into Xbox Live. When it comes to playing the console port of Universe at War, two things come to mind: how well those controls work, and what a colossal waste of time it is.

It’s been said many times before, and probably far more eloquently, but PC gamers are just different to console gamers. It’s perfectly normal to be into both, but trying to breed the two together is plain bonkers.

My personal theory on why it will never work is this: PC gamers like to see themselves as a little bit like God. They also tend towards a little idiosyncrasy we like to call “being a control freak.”

After all, what other disorder could force a mind to eschew the time honoured system of one player controls one character, and instead opt for controlling thirty or forty players at the same time, plus all the factories that pump them out. Then, instead of enjoying the thrill of combat, life, death and overly complicated combos, make the gameplay about the management of said units. Then give these units budgets, deadlines, acquisition goals and pastel pink neckties. Your average console gamer is thinking at this point: “Why not brief them on bloody Powerpoint then make them file a report at the end, for Christ’s sake?”

But all you need to do is observe PC gamers, constantly rearranging their RAID arrays, overclocking their graphics cards, bloating their system with more RAM than a Himalayan goat herder, and the truth becomes clear: It’s not that PC gamers don’t like gaming, it’s just that, where possible, PC gamers like their games to be just a little bit more like work.

To be fair, most PC owners see console gamers as a bunch of guffawing thigh slappers but that’s besides the point. Regardless of intelligence, the average console gamer is going to liken the Universe at War experience to playing an FPS via email.

There’s several reasons why: The commands, though neatly shoehorned into the XBox controller through a series of rotating menus, need to be effectively learned by heart to be used quickly. Making this extra difficult is the fact that each command description takes a few seconds to appear. When it does, it’s in text that makes the menus in Dead Rising look like twenty foot billboards. So for most of the game you’re going to be choosing commands using icons that resemble their function about as accurately as a wavy line represents the Pacific ocean.

Other hot key replacement devices include the ability to access your building queues, construction and research trees without selecting a unit, which work well and expand depending on what units you’ve built.

Navigation is equal parts joy and misery. There’s a speedy expandable mini map that will scroll your view in real time using the right stick, but there’s also a jump to hotspots button that becomes less than useless during multiple skirmishes. When the crap hits the fan, as it invariably does, you’ll be rocketing around the map, trying to select five grey ant men who are several counties apart, all the while wishing for just half a keyboard and a zoom function that could move somewhere beyond, “really really close,” and, “really close.”


“Forget all that, tell me how Petroglyph has managed to once again assemble three unique and astoundingly balanced classes, but this time in an entirely fresh and creative intellectual property,” I hear you demand. Well, they have done that, but why should it be applauded? Reviewers have laid games like Tomb Raider onto the rack and pulled its arms off like a trapped spider for adding three new features to the same game six times. RTS developers do it and we weep with joy like they’ve resurrected Jesus from fossilised DNA.

Universe at War makes no attempts to move away from the old RTS three balanced army approach. In Command and Conquer: Generals you had the Americans, the Chinese and the GLA. This time, you’ve got Novus, the Hierarchy and the Masari. The Novus have the swarming abilities of the Chinese and the “tunnelling” (except this time it’s teleporting) abilities of the GLA. The Hierarchy have the big eff-off Walkers that are in all the marketing and the other large but powerful units like the USA. Ok, the Masari have an interesting Light-mode for defense and Dark-mode for offence thing going on, which is certainly new outside of shooters.



Of course, RTS stalwarts all know that defence mode is just shorthand for, “getting annihilated, but slower” and will discover that this fact is no less true when playing as the Masari. I’m in no way saying that any race kicks more or less arse than the other, but applauding an RTS developer for making its races balanced is like applauding a seagull for stealing chips. It’s just what they do.

It would be great to be able to talk about the multiplayer at this point, as there is a cool looking “Conquer the World” mode where you can challenge for different territories, as well as traditional skirmish matches. But the fact is, your average console gamer could curse their way through eight games of COD 4 by the time your first match is ready to begin. We’re already a few weeks into general release and no one’s out there, folks, which is a pretty good indicator of how it’s going to be in future.

The only thing that’s left to describe is the story, which is the usual hammy mix of war and sci fi movie references pushing along an admittedly interesting and novel plot. The Masari certainly suffer from a bit of underdevelopment, but the forgiving learning curve and relatively short campaigns mean that things rarely get boring.

So here’s the rub: If you are a PC gamer who opted to drop your tax rebate on a console instead of upgrading for the umpteenth time, there’s enough to like here. It’s another predictable RTS from a likeable bunch who do this stuff pretty well. If you’re a console gamer, however, you probably stopped reading after the first paragraph anyway.