Universal Combat: A World Apart (PC)

Don’t kid yourself in thinking you can leap into the cockpit of an F-14 Tomcat and fly away to the tune of: Highway to the Danger Zone. The chances of a regular joe like me or most of you being able to cope with the bewildering array of controls, buttons and complex avionics are a million to one and only really happens in movies.

Likewise – you can’t just jump into the bridge of a Battlecruiser and expect to get the hang of it straight away. You’re going to need to read the manual from cover to cover to fully understand every system and how each one is simulated. Sure you can blast away in any number of Instant Action scenarios or take a spin in the ROAM campaigns, but you’re going to be scratching your head as to why Insurgents have boarded your ship and are systematically blowing up your key locations.

How do you assign Security to hunt these fellows down, how do you make Planetfall and how on earth do you fly this thing? It took me quite a while to get used to it, but when I did I had a lot of fun just trying out the various options – and this is the key here – fun. If you want to use your warship as a trader, you can. If you want to explore the massive Elite-style Universe, you can. Your own limit is your own imagination, there are random encounters, attacks and people in Derek’s Universe go and do their own thing.

You can jump into a sector and witness the Insurgents or any other faction battling it out, you can join in or you can steer clear. The gameplay for me is spot on, letting me do my own thing but not allowing me to become bored since there’s so much I was allowed to do. Make some money, buy massive weapons and sit in orbit while you send down a nuke to a non-friendly base.

You can fly any of your fighters, any of your support craft and any of your vehicles – it’s all yours to command/control/play with. In essence it’s a big-kids playground/toybox and the Universe is yours to poke/prod/tickle as much as you like. It is nice to see that the control system has been improved from Universal Combat.

For example, once you learn how to use the transporter – you can send down an away team to a planet to explore. Don’t like transporters, then load up an ATV into the back of a Shuttle, load the ATV with men and fly it down yourself. If you don’t want to fly it yourself then send it there with a pilot.

You can give orders to any of your outbound units, fighters, support craft and if you have enough rank you can even control a whole fleet of ships.

There’s a FP view and there are 3d worlds, with foliage and other elements. I have heard people say they are too barren, but frankly I don’t care (They don't seem all that barren to me either). I mean if you were to give each world that’s out there, the same detail as you might get on a game like Quake 4 and the same level of graphic shiny-effects as Half-Life 2 then you’d require a computer that Douglas Adams would have been proud of.

There’s a difference with mapping/modelling and creating a Universe and making it live/breathe/react – than making a lot of pretty space sectors and filling it with an abundance of stations/ships. In UC: AWA I can pick a planet and do what I could do in Elite: Frontier and Frontier: First Encounters, landing on it and exploring the surface.