Universe at War: Earth Assault (PC)

A funny thing happened on the way to the gold master.
1/31/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 3

The interface is the first and most consistent problem. It simply can't keep up with the pace of the game. It suffers from a constant and stingy refusal to give the player useful information. There's a lot of extraneous activity onscreen, but it's impossible to see how a battle is going until it's over. For instance, you can't see the amount of health enemy units have without mousing over them one at a time -- and even then, you only get the percentage of health it has remaining rather than any sense for its total hit points. There's no distinction between a lowly Ohm robot and a mighty Peacebringer tank. Want to know how much and what kind of damage a unit does? Want to know a unit's range? Want to know about an enemy's special powers beyond the flavor text? Want to know how you're supposed to destroy that alien walker? Want to see a tooltip for an enemy unit or building to find out what it does and whether it's worth destroying? Want to know what the glowing green special effect means? Too bad. Universe at War might be generous with the flavor, but it's stingy with the data.

Unit management is equally sloppy. The AI and pathfinding are terrible, and there's no useful way to manage large groups of units. Consider, for example, that you find there's no efficient attack move; instead, units simply march on to their assigned destination until you manually tell them to stop. There's no way to keep faster flying units with slower land units, resulting in armies that are spread out across the map. Many maps have destructible terrain, but there's no way to manually target it to let your units through, which breaks up groups even more. And the prohibitive unit limit puts a serious ceiling on the number of viable strategies. Did Petroglyph really mean for the default unit limit to be 40? That's not an army. That's a scouting party.

You can't even queue up building orders to manage your base, something that's standard in any modern RTS. But this is nowhere near as bad as chasing hardpoint nodes to configure a moving walker, much less trying to get a sense for what you've already built on which walker. Even if you're not building alien walkers, you get to manually target the node icons when you fight them. Things like this might by funny if they weren't so obviously bad ideas. Did no one at Petroglyph notice how awkward their game turned out to be? So much of what passes for gameplay in Universe at War is simply wrestling with the interface and units. Even the single-player conquest mode, a strategic campaign meta-game, is a wash for running in real time, having a terrible interface, and being poorly documented.

Finally, Universe at War deserves raspberries for throwing its lot in with Microsoft's horrible Games for Windows Live, a PC-based offshoot of Xbox Live, but minus helpful features like a chat lobby or custom names for hosted matches. Adding insult to injury, Microsoft expects you to pay a regular subscription fee to access features that are free in other games. Given the state of the game and the transparent money grab of Games for Windows Live, Universe at War doesn't have much life expectancy as a multiplayer game, and considering how inelegant it is as a single-player game, it unfortunately doesn't have much life expectancy there, either.