So here's the quandary I face in this review: on the one hand I've had some cracking skirmish and multiplayer games of Universe at War; on the other, the campaign in which aliens invade the Earth is rather aged and clunksome.
I can't genuinely recommend this ahead of the dumb delights of C&C3, nor is it comparable to the cold war retro-vision of World in Conflict.
Universe at War is a fragment of the Westwood-era RTS (indeed, its creators worked on many of those games) and so when filtered through our modern eyes it is at once thoroughly enjoyable and at the same time, well, a bit old hat. I want to recommend UaW, yet at the same time, I can't.
The campaign's sluggish start doesn't really help matters. The opening levels are almost entirely tutorial-led, 'go to X, blow up Y'-type objectives, and while this is to be expected, they feel like even the developers didn't want to bother with them. The initial experience is tedious, especially since the first couple of levels are played with human units - units that play no real role in the major body of the game.
I wanted to be tutored thoroughly in the extensive base-building, unit-evolving processes that the game does have to offer, but instead found myself at the mercy of the weak storyline and some babbled-out Earth-invasion cliché.
Eventually, a couple of hours into the game, I started to get access to the full range of extra-terrestrial conflict that's on offer: building the full bases, with all their super-weapons and high-end units - but this really doesn't come around fast enough.
Let's fill in some detail about those alien races. There are three alien factions, each with their own modus operandi. Petroglyph have clearly worked hard to create that 'asymmetric' faction structure that we all seem to have demanded since Starcraft.
Unfortunately for Universe at War, one of the factions is far more satisfying to play than the other two. Now, you might argue that it's just a matter of taste, but I'd argue it's just a matter of whose base is a giant radiation-spewing red behemoth summoned from the sky by a fiery glyph, and whose... isn't.
So, faction number one are the Novus. These are the iPod chic faction. Their bases are all blue lights and white panels, and some of their most potent tools are the pylons that allow some of their units to 'upload' and travel vast distances in an instant. This means you can quickly build a line out to resources and have your collection bots zip back and forth without having to worry much about defending them.
The Novus units rely on 'information' as one of their primary conceits, so there are hackers that can scramble and immobilise units, and there are 'patches' that can be applied across your army to counter a particular problem, such as radiation.
As with all the other factions, there are also some core hero units, such as a mecha piloted by a beautiful alien woman and a cloaking craft that can upload units before downloading them anywhere on the field. To give you a taste of the route the tech tree takes, the top weapons are a Black Hole bomb and an EMP blast. Once the tedious tutorial stuff is out of the way they're enormous fun to play.
But they're not as much fun as the Hierarchy. These alien conquistadores are the jocks of space: they drag in every conceivable UFO legend and then beef it up with steroids and a red paint job. These guys use a 'glyph burner' to call giant tripedal units down from orbit.
The glyphs are remarkably similar to crop circles, which further buys into the whole UFO mythos. Their air units are flying saucers, their scouts are 'greys', and their resource-collection beasts do very nasty things to cattle.
Playing as the Hierarchy is a fun mix of the weird and the outright brutal. You're far more likely to feel like you're having fun ravaging the landscape when you see Hierarchy units at your fingertips, running across the gameworld terrain.
With their harvester units hoovering up all that they come across, giant shark men barrelling into anything they encounter, and the awesomely evil hero characters lording their way across the maps, it's fair to say the Hierarchy own this game entirely.
The Hierarchy party pieces, of course, are the Walker base units. Instead of major buildings, they have different types of Walker that can be moved around and used as offensive units at will.
They're glorious and massively powerful but cannot be used without support: Hierarchy tactics depend on you knowing how and when to risk your variously decked-out Walkers in an offensive capacity. (Using them without support is what the campaign AI does repeatedly, and disappointingly.)
Finally there's the Masari. These guys are supposed to be a kind of ancient super-race, gods of some kind, and their designs are reminiscent of Egyptian, Mayan and Medieval baroque. These ancient types return from under the sea, Atlantis style, and kick off fighting the Hierarchy.
They waffle on about this and that, and really aren't particularly compelling. They're the point at which the otherwise exuberant design ideas from Petroglyph begin to sag. I'm sure they could have come up with a third, even more alien faction, but instead they've gone for one that's humanoid and pseudo-mythological.
The Masari units are a mix of superhumans, obelisks and metallic angel-beings, all of which are powerful and expensive to field. They also have a 'light and dark' mode switch, enabling a different range of powers and conditions depending on their state.
What all this means is that you have to figure out when you need to keep those expensive Masari elite units safe, and when you need to plunge them into ultra-death: just select the appropriate mode.
The Masari are arguably the subtlest of the trio, and most difficult of the three races to play. Consequently they're by far the least interesting faction, and the major element of the game world and fiction that I felt to be a letdown.
They also have the ponciest voices. (The Hierarchy have the beefiest robo-monster voices, which further adds to their awesome galactic-meatheadness.)
What Universe at War's campaign boils down to is a poor excuse to introduce the neat ideas behind the various factions in a classical RTS style, level by level. But it's poorly delivered, and not enough of the challenges are hearty enough to satisfy an RTS gamer of any degree of experience: I'm never really pressed to use the Novus grid or the Black Hole bomb, as I did in multiplayer, nor does the campaign make the most of the fantastic Hierarchy walking bases.
The story takes three or four hours to get interesting and then goes and introduces the weakest faction in the game, the Masari. It's an incredibly uneven experience. Of course, you could just skip all that and go straight to the global scenarios...
This being a Petroglyph game (they previously made Star Wars: Empire at War and its expansion pack) there's another opportunity to conquer the Earth on offer. You can ignore the campaign and instead opt for the 'scenarios' that allow you to use a global map to fight your own war across the regions of the world.
You take command of the three hero characters of each faction and then build up resources to take on the AI factions. It's a bit of a shame that there's not really much of a tutorial to teach you how to use this mode in a little more detail, but with some guesswork you can build up some satisfying campaigns.
Once you're into the body of the mid-section engagements for the scenario you start to see the full scope of the fights (just as you do in multiplayer) and you begin to get a taste of the breadth of the ideas that the team sank into the game. It's just a pity that the Novus and Masari are so obviously less interesting to play as than the heroically titanic Hierarchy monsters.
Universe at War will have a following of fans who enjoy what the game has to offer in multiplayer - ideas like the time-based technology development mean that this game isn't at the mercy of initial build plans quite as much as, say, Blizzard titles have been.
This might just help to make the playing field a little more level for those of us who want to dabble in the dark art of RTS games online, rather than find ourselves utterly engaged or thrashed by the resident masters.
Perhaps the reason I've been relatively unimpressed with the overall game is that so many recent RTSs (Company of Heroes, World in Conflict) have delivered both comparative visual loveliness and demonstrable conceptual cleverness at the same time. Universe at War does try to furnish us with some entertaining constructs, but ultimately delivers neither great splendour nor genuine surprise.
It really doesn't help that it's relatively ugly, too, with a constrained, almost claustrophobic camera and preposterously unattractive environments. I can't quite figure our why, in this era of three-dimensions, the game should make me feel as if I were tied so tightly to a small plot of grey or brown land.
Getting some perspective on the sheer enormity of the Hierarchy walkers could have been fun, and I really want to be able to zoom out. And when that happens, I want to see trees and valleys and all things pretty. Universe at War's aliens might be shiny, but the world they're fighting over is definitely in need of a makeover. I know, I know - I'm so demanding.
I really wanted to like Universe at War far more than I did. It never goes quite far enough, nor delivers the money shot.
This would be an ideal time-filler if you're chewing at your knuckles waiting for Starcraft 2 (especially since the multiplayer is so strong), but I suspect it will disappear from our collective memory once the big Blizzard game hits.
Why don't reviewers mention the game breaking bugs that are plagued in games anymore. Case in point Universe at War currently has a bug which crashes the game whenever you load a save...the patch is due at the end of the month, but it would have been nice to know about this before parting with hard earned cash!
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