For years, it was widely thought that the first-person shooter just couldn't work on consoles. Then Halo came along and proved that a genre forever played with a mouse and keyboard could work and work well with a different control scheme. Sure, there's a small, vocal and largely humorless faction of PC gamers who claim that console shooters are inferior, but these cranks are like Fox News viewer -- they'll never be happy. Meanwhile, the real-time strategy game is now in the unenviable position that the shooter was in ten years ago. Powerful game consoles now have the horsepower to keep tabs on all the military units, resource gathering and player-placed buildings that are common in the genre. Simply porting these games to set-top boxes just isn't going to cut it. Universe at War: Earth Assault is a poster child for the solid PC game marred by an inelegant transition to the living room.
Three Tribes
Universe at War: Earth Assault sticks close to the StarCraft formula. It pits three sci-fi-themed factions against each other and does so in a way that forces the player to balance defensive base building with bald aggression. The game's makers came up with a surprisingly strong story. Our planet is under siege by a warlike alien race called The Hierarchy. Like a mix of the Klingons and the Borg, these villains sweep across the galaxy waging war and leaving spent planets in their wake. The Novus are the universe's knights in shining armor – a race of robots programmed to protect wimpy planets from Hierarchy destruction. The Masari are an ancient race slumbering beneath the pyramids in Egypt. They're woken by earthbound ruckus caused by clashes between the Hierarchy, Novus and the remaining humans. Despite centuries of sleep they roll out of bed ticked that the beautiful planet they chose as their home has been trashed.
Fission Mailed?
The campaign lets players spend quality time with each of the races, learning the ropes of their diverse technology trees and getting familiar with their heroes. As in StarCraft, these three campaigns let us see the conflict from all three points of view. Each campaign follows a progression that introduces the player to the faction's unique powers. Straight-up raid and defense missions are accented with the occasional hero-oriented scenario – where building takes a backseat to straight-up combat. With all the pieces seemingly in place, Universe at War: Earth Assault fumbles in the final yards.
The harsh reality is that this game was made for the PC and the transition to consoles wasn't an entirely smooth one. All the game's onscreen text is a mite small. While the menu system for building and commanding troops is perfectly adequate, tiny but significant technological issues mar the experience. For example, there's brief lag that slows down pop-up of the description text for each option. Unless you've memorized the details of every unit, building and power this minor hang-up can feel annoying, especially when playing a game where time is of the essence.
Merely Sufficient
The only real answer to the problem of real-time strategies on consoles is to design them with specifically with the platform's unique limitations and strengths in mind. Universe at War: Earth Assault wasn't really created with this philosophy in mind. And while the PC may remain the ideal way to experience this solid strategy game, it's by no means unplayable on the Xbox 360. The story, setting and characters (while not terribly original) are executed so sharply that they actually make up for the game's minor hang-ups. Universe at War: Earth Assault isn't the game that proves that the real-time strategy can really work on a console. It's not a failure by any means, but neither is it a resounding success. We may have to wait for Civilization Revolution for the RTS to make the big leap to consoles.
Review by: Gus Mastrapa
