Caltrops - Gamerasutra - I think I like Universe at War: Earth Assault, I'm not sure

Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra

by Fortinbras 12/17/2007, 4:13am PST

According to Steam I've been playing it for about 20 hours in 2 days. The campaign is dull and uninspiring and really tells you that the first Command and Conquer games would have blown without Joseph Kucan running the cutscene department. What's really compelling is how differently two of the three groups play.

Usually in my experience when developers tell you that they're making three unique factions it's always over some trivial shit, but the Heirarchy and Novus really are different in just about everything in regards to their playstyle. Heirarchy doesn't really build bases, they have maybe two static structures, a builder-producer and a structure that gives you your map/unit detection. They can field up to 3 gigantic armored Tri and Quad-legged walking deathmobiles that can be upgraded with unit-production or bigger guns or boosted weapons, except for the Science Walker which is all about being a mobile superweapon with a decent rate of fire. Their resourcing consists of tripods that eat everything and everyone in front of them with lasers. It's usually enough to deter less than several units from trying to ruin it. Still way too vulnerable if you ask me.

Novus are animu robots that build telephone poles every few feet to almost insta-travel anywhere the network reaches, and the poles are stealthed to make dismantling it a pain in the ass. For resources all you do is build a structure and it auto-sends out small flyers that it replaces for free, so harvester-camping is OUT.

The Masari I played about two missions on and then switched over to a freeform world-conquest scenario instead. They play very generically, their only quirk is some Ikaruga light/dark crap, but why they'd ever switch out of dark I don't know because they seem to kick a lot of ass in dark mode and they get a secondary health/shield bar to boot.

Resource management is most micromanaged with the Heirarchy, pretty much hands-off with the Novus, and completely non-existent with the Masari. Which is probably where my main hang-up so far is....playing a game with non-Masari against Masari is like playing a Starcraft $$$UNLIMITED MONEY$$$ map with all the 999999999999999999 mineral spots on the OPPOSING side. Masari get to build buildings for their resource input while the other two fuck off and run across the map strip-mining buildings, cows, water towers, and anything that's not nailed down and/or concrete. I just got out of a four-hour skirmish against a single CPU player ON MEDIUM difficulty and it's the first time I've ever been beaten by a CPU for running out of resources.

Oh, did I mention that almost all of the units firing ranges are LESS than the gigantic nuclear explosion that occurs whenever a light-mode Masari resource-producing structure goes up? And no matter how quick I click even my harrier jet-like robot fighters tend to fly in a circle for a precious half-second, guaranteeing at least one of them dies in a suicidal explosion. So individually picking off each of their resource buildings doesn't seem to do a goddamn thing, and even if it did they seem to replace them far quicker than I can harvest resources now that the map's basically dry. Now, this wouldn't be so goddamn problematic if it weren't for the fact that not ONCE have I seen Masari units leave behind any salvagable material when I blow the shit out of them, and oh god did I blow the shit out of them. When my units die most of them leave a pile of shit that can be recycled and put into use as a new unit, keeping Heirarchy/Novus economies from stalling out but for some fucking reason the developers chose to give the infinite resource producers the least amount of resources recoverable through salvage. Great design decision, fuckheads.

I'm not a dumpster diver myself but if I were and I was looking through Petroglyph's trash for a rough draft of their design doc I imagine it would look something like this:

- Insert a faction with asskicking monster War of the Worlds-style Tripods (check!)
- Create a game engine that runs at top settings on DX9 on a medium-level video card (check!)
- Kawaii Robots ^________________________________^;;; (CHECK CHECK! ^_^)
- Build upon the galaxy campaign system used in Empires at War (check!)
- Insert generic human faction with infinite resources and balance it against the two factions that have to scour the map (????????)
- Profit!

Still worth the cheese I paid over Steam for it, in my opinion, but goddamnit I fucking hate Masari and whatever genius didn't think through balancing finite versus infinite resource models.