Universe at War: Earth Assault (PC)

So you have the:

Novus: they owe a lot to anime and Robotech in particular, high tech force, fragile and they’re able to move inexpensive units around the battlefield using a complex array of energy towers. They’re hard to learn to use correctly but they have some nice special abilities and their heroes are pretty good. The Novus’ resource gatherers make it hard to actually damage the faction’s economy in the field since they’re quick and agile.

Hierarchy: Inspired much by War of the Worlds? I think so, they have no base structure. They move around with giant war machines that can be upgraded with weapons, mind-control devices, and numerous armour plates and so on. Their resource gatherers remind me of the harvesters from War of the Worlds too. This isn’t a bad thing because the Hierarchy are an excellent race for dominating the battlefield with sheer oppressive alien firepower and might. They’re perfect for the player who wants to stomp over things and watch civilian houses burn in an orgy of destruction. They also make excellent siege platforms and you can basically march your base into the edge of the enemy base and hammer them with advanced weapons, whilst your alien troops swarm their defenders.

Masari: These are another odd faction, ideally suited for a turtle or base defence kind of player. Able to build up resources at their base, their builders can improve or change the functionality of the buildings and change unit production speed etc. They are a strange god-like race that’s able to shift between Light and Dark modes depending if they want speed or protection. They’re a good faction if you want to keep your opponents guessing and if you enjoy being able to send out skirmishers to keep your enemies busy whilst you build up to some powerful late-game units.

If you’ve played Empire at War from the same developers, you’ll soon come to grips with their Risk-style strategy mode. If you’re not a fan of that, you can play the maps in Skirmish or MP so it’s not a problem. You’ll have to get Gold if you really want to play all the content though, since some of it is restricted from base silver members. Something that’s bound to upset the PC gaming community greatly and I’m not convinced the price of the membership is worth it just for this game.

Apart from the great gameplay and unique factions, UaW has some pretty sharp visuals. All the units have a unique look that complements the factions they belong to. With the Novus being your anime, quick, agile robot style faction and the Hierarchy having more than a little in common with the tripod style walkers from War of the Worlds, even down to the design of some of the units and the power they can unleash.

There are numerous rivers, bridges and buildings in the game and the level designers have placed them in an intelligent manner. You can see the level of detail in the textures is definitely an improvement over the studios earlier work and they’ve made a lot of advancements in their graphical style compared to the Empire at War game + sequel.

The use of light and shadow in the game is great, the maps are pretty well designed and there are quite a few options you can alter when setting up a skirmish or mp game. I’d make sure you turn of Dx10 at the moment though, it really is a cloggy mess and it causes frame-rate drops when a lot of special effects happen at once. I feel this is more Microsoft’s fault than the developers however. Once you turn up the Dx9 effects and sliders, the game looks just as good in that mode, you soon forget about the cruddy Dx10.

I’ve a lot of love for the OTT effects in the game and the superweapons are pretty great. I’m not going to spoil a thing for you though, you’re going to have to play it yourselves to see the units, the weapons, the effects and the game.

Straybolt, out…