cars and bikes

Despite the political problems between the developer and publisher of this title 3000AD has managed to produce a well polished product.

My personal feelings towards this type of title is that it divides the game playing audience into two categories:

1) Those who like flashy graphics and a lot of action and want to sit and be entertained for a couple hours.

2) Those who enjoy a more long term and strategic experience and who want drawn out gameplay.

UC delivers both oddly enough. You can enjoy the instant action scenarios as a marine or fighter pilot and get a quick adrenaline fix. Or if you decide that you want to engage in a larger scale game than you can pursue careers as a ship commander for example. Either way you going to be entertained proportionally to the time you spend playing. To me this is the correct formulae for a successful game.

Graphics and sound in this game are very good and it is refreshing to be able to max out the graphics settings on a new title and still achieve a great framerate. Another nice change is that space feels roomy personally I found X2: The Threat actually gave me a sense of claustrophobia, which is an emotion one should not feel in SPACE.

There is a learning curve associated with this title but there are a few caveats to this. First if you want to play the FPS part the controls are no more difficult than any other FPS. Second, the Battlecruiser part of the game from a perspective of controlling your ship is no more difficult than X2:Threat. The real challenge comes in terms of managing your ship from a tactical and economic standpoint. This is what separates a novice that has played this title for a few hours from an expert that has really spent some time digging into the details.

The manual for this game is actually printed and over 10 pages in length ļ The trend these days has been to save publishing costs by making PDFs of the manual. A practice that drives me insane because I need a manual in front of me while I try playing. I am sick of buying a $50 dollar game and a $40 inkjet cartridge to print the manual. There is plenty of online documentation that details all of the objects that are represented in the game. PC career choices, manual revisions, story, and control details are also included as a set of easily printed hyperlinked webpages.

I have owned this game for 2 days and have played it more than X2 & Freelancer combined. For $20 the value per dollar of this game is very high. From a moral point of view I feel the developer did a better than $20 dollar job.

I will leave it to others to do a more technical review.

In summary this is a niche title and like an independent film you are going to either love or hate this game. One thing I can guarantee you is that as an "indie" game the developer has made design choices that are unorthodox when compared to a mainstream title. Like an "indie" film director these choices reflect a more risky and artistic statement rather something that a marketing firm has deemed safe and appealing.

I bought this game, hoping that it would provide me with something fun to do whenever I had free time. Yes, the prospect of engaging enemies in major battles for control of numerous spaceports and bases on 4 different theatres of combat appealed to me. So, between this and spending $39.95 on Joint Operations, I chose this.

What was I thinking?

This game freezes often, and I can't even find the "Quit" option. Apparently, the developers wanted to make it a puzzle just trying to figure out how to move your ship or fire your guns. You can't do anything in this game, it crashes, freezes, you can't control it, and in the campaign you dont even know what to do. The best part is that you can't even save or load or go to an options screen. This waste of a CD should be taken out of every store in the world. Trust me, I enjoy all sorts of games from Hearts of Iron to Raven Shield to Battlefield 1942 and Starfleet Command III - DO NOT BUY THIS GAME OR ANY OTHER GAME MADE BY DEREK SMART.

This is what you need to do to appreciate this game:

FORGET ALL THE ESTABLISHED RULES OF MAINSTREAM GAMES!!!

Done that? Good.

Now, the most important thing to remember is to read the manual before you begin. That is what it is for. Unlike most (if not all) other games, the manual actually performs a function. Funnily enough, it tells you how to play the game.

Secondly, make sure you have the latest patch (which, contrary to 'a gamer from Portland', you are not required to register to download. I know this because I downloaded it BEFORE I registered). This will fix many of the reported issues, most of which are there due to development time constraints.

Thirdly, do not expect to just jump in this game and start blasting alien scum within ten minutes. If you do, you will hate this game and, unfortunately, have bought the wrong game for your particular tastes. You will need to spend time learning the control system and basically getting the 'feel' of the game.

Once you have done all this, however, you end up with a game that gives you a LOT. Certainly in the Roam mode, you are basically in the middle of an entire virtual universe where you can do just about anything. Whilst you are encouraged towards combat (as the name would suggest), you can just as easily become a peaceful explorer, trader or miner. What is rather unique about this game, and a very good thing, in my opinion, is the complexity. In most spacey type games, there is no real distinction between your ship and you. In this, you actually play a character as opposed to a ship, so, for example, you can send your AE (Alter Ego, your game character) into a shuttle, launch from your battlecruiser and use the shuttle to do some trading whilst you order your battlecruiser to attack an enemy starbase. The most complex I've had it (so far) is, on a planet, having a naval group giving covering artillery fire to a detachment of infantry marines assaulting a planetary base backed up by armoured cavalry whilst, at the same time, in space, having my carrier class ship attacking a starbase with support from two battlecruiser escorts and using its fighter wings as a guard against enemy reinforcements entering the system whilst my AE was using a shuttle to trade to raise some money and having a couple of drones on a planet doing some mining.

There are some negative points. The first is that yes, the graphics do look a LITTLE dated, but unlike most modern games, it is the gameplay that makes this game, not flashy graphics.

Secondly, there are quite a few bugs, but these are being worked out as I type. This is the only thing that makes me say that unless you are quite patient, you maybe shouldn't buy it....yet. On the other hand, if you are not quite patient, you are not going to enjoy this game anyway, as it requires an investment in time and brain-power to get the most of.

In conclusion, I would say this is a game you would either love with a passion, or loathe with a passion. If you like highly in-depth, complex games that give a lot of satisfaction if you give it an investment of time and energy, you are probably going to be the former.