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First off let me stress that I’m not a big RTS fan by any stretch of the imagination. I much prefer my strategy games to be of the turn based variety. The only RTS games I’ve really enjoyed over the years are K240 on the Amiga, and the original command and conquer. I always have a hard time getting to grips with most modern RTS’s. With this in mind here’s how I found Universe at War: Earth Assault.

The single player game begins with you playing as the Novus getting ready to be beamed to Earth to stop the Hierarchy invasion taking place. This is basically the tutorial teaching you the controls and the unique features of the Novus force. RTS games on consoles are a touchy subject with few games managing to pull of a decent easy to use control method. Thankfully Petroglyph have managed to come up with a very competent and accessible system which is explained during the tutorial. Basically what would be the mouse cursor is effectively a target stuck to the centre of the screen, so to move the cursor you move the screen. The main 4 buttons are set to select an individual unit, select all units and cancel selection. The areas where the control method comes into it’s own though is the simple use of the trigger and bumper buttons to quickly access special abilities and unit groups. If you have all units selected when using the right trigger button, all the units special abilities are brought up in a circular menu. The unit that has that ability will then perform this while everyone else will carry on with what they were doing with all units still selected. Groups are formed automatically and accessible with the right bumper button. Here you can select your specific groups of units. Holding down the Right Trigger brings the radar into view from the upper right of the screen and allows you to quickly direct units over large areas.

The only things really missing from the control method is the inability to create custom groups. I wanted to create a defence force to defend my base and then an attacking force to go off on the objectives. Achieving this was a little frustrating as once you had mixed units into 2 different squads on the map, you then effectively couldn’t use the group functionality due to the mixed nature or the units in each of your squads. Instead having to revert to the old moving the cursor around while holding down A to select everything you want routine. It’s not a game breaker by any stretch of the imagination but if included then Petroglyph would have come up with the perfect method to control an RTS on a console. Without it, the controls are still some of the best you will see in a Console RTS but not 100% perfect.

With the tutorial out the way it’s onto Earth where you begin as a US marine force trying to rescue the President who is trapped in the White House with a full on alien invasion taking place outside. A couple of missions in and you quickly get massively underpowered in the weapons department when a giant Hierarchy walker shows up. Fortunately the Novus arrive just in time. At this point the Humans become a side show to the game as you take control of the Novus as you did in the tutorial from here on in, battling the Heirarchy to send them packing from Earth.

It’s from here that some of the games original features start to show through. The Novus have the ability to transport along power lines to quickly move around the map. This makes a big change to the way the game plays, no longer do you have to trawl from one end of the map to the other, directing your units around rocks etc while the a.i struggles to work out the best route, as seen in many other RTS games. Instead you just double tap the location you want to send your units to. They then whiz down the power lines and appear within seconds.  In single player campaign this is a big help on some levels with power lines structures already in place. It also opens up lots of new strategies in multiplayer/skirmish mode due to the uniqueness of this ability to the faction.

The campaign mode tends to follow a set path of objectives, with little room for manoeuvre away from these to apply any real variety in the strategy you take to complete each task. Having said that it does provide structure to the game and keeps it ticking over with new objectives changing the way you need to play each particular level. It’s here though that some of the games technical problems begin to show through. I always see one of the highlights of RTS games as being the large scale battles that take place with hundreds of units on screen at once making a very impressive battle scene. Unfortunately there’s a unit cap of 90 in the single player mode which I found a little disappointing. When battling against the Hierarchy’s giant walkers, the on-screen action still looks impressive with so much happening on screen, but it’s here you see the most likely reason for the cap. At times the frame rate drops to a crawl, so much so that sometimes you think the game has crashed due to nothing happening on screen, then it seems to get a kick and suddenly start chugging away again.

The technical problems are a real shame as the the battles involving the walkers are one of the highlights of the game. There are a few different varieties of them , all made up from numerous different customisable parts. You might decide to take out it’s legs, then it’s guns and finally it’s core. Alternatively, knock out it’s giant arms, to reveal its shield generators, take these out too then easily take out it’s inner core. The time it takes to down a walker various considerably depending on the strategy you take. All of this leads to a very satisfying end when it finally collapses in a big heap, especially as the frame rate then gets back up to speed.

Once the Novus campaign is complete it’s onto taking control of the Hierarchy. You now take control of the Walkers yourselves, able to customise it’s item socket points, such as going for large amounts of shielding or go heavy on the weapons. The walker effectively acts as the Hierarchy’s base, with units created and spawned next to the Walker, allowing reinforcements to be dumped straight into the battle, handily counteracting the Novus’s ability to quickly travel along power lines. The third Faction is called Masari. There special ability is some kind of Light/Dark, but I’ll be honest and say I couldn’t really get to grips with this and so didn’t really play as them much.  These well balanced and original abilities make the multiplayer and skirmish modes very well balanced and provide some originality compared to your average RTS game. Ad to this the different strategies able to be employed by going down different research brackets to achieve different abilities and there’s a lot to work with in the skirmish modes to try out different strategies.

All of this is tied together with a bland unimaginative storyline. You don’t really feel like progressing through the single player to find out what happens to each faction and after a while the objectives do become repetitive. The Skirmish modes and multiplayer are where the game really shines, but as I’m pretty rubbish at all RTS games I got whooped time after time in these modes. There’s a great game in there beneath it’s problems. If the story was a little more interesting and imaginative this could have been an excellent all round game. As it stands, with the poor story line and technical issues it’s going to have to be docked points but if your a big RTS fan then you should definitely check this title out for the skirmish and multiplayer modes alone.

7/10

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