Universe At War: Earth Assault Review (360)

…Now available in console flavour!

Groundhog day, a cracking film about experiencing the same day over and over again. I felt the same feeling when Universe at War: Earth Assault landed on my front door mat to review. After inserting the game into my 360 and watching the stunning cinematic into it twigged. The reason this game felt like I had known it before, is that the same game had been released a few months ago on the pc, and I had in fact play tested & reviewed it for this very same site! Joy I thought, I don’t even have to play this, I`ll just cut and paste the pc review, and no one will know the difference. That was until I had an email from the boss saying he hopes that I will approach this review as if it is a new game, and not just copy off my own pc review. Curses, and I would have got away with it if it hadn’t been for them pesky kids!

a cracking console RTS, it falls short of greatness due to its obvious PC roots.

Ok, so Universe at War: Earth Assault is a new game from Potroglyph. It is a RTS game that wowed the critics when released on the pc some months ago. The premise behind this game is that a race of Aliens called the Hierarchy has invaded earth, and is soundly spanking our collective human bottoms, when a second race of Aliens comes to earth to save humanity (or possibly just to wipe out the Hierarchy as they are their sworn enemy). While these two faction duke it out using our green and blue planet as their battleground, a third faction rise out of the planets oceans, The Masari, another alien race who have been slumbering, waiting for a time like this.

Now since this is a quality RTS, each of the three factions have different strengths and weakness (for more details, please check out my pc review, elsewhere on this site) Each makes you approach the game from a different tactical stance, and the balance is as good as it was for the pc version. The main problem with this, is that it is in fact no different from the pc version. A simple port, with control pad functionallity. The fact that this is still one of the best console games of its genre matters not to me. For a change, it would have been nice if this had been built from the ground up, with consoles in mind. Multiplayer via XBL is pretty cool, but as with the single player, you just wish you were playing the pc version, with its mouse/keyboard combination, and without the graphical constraints of a console.

Even though this is a cracking console RTS, it falls short of greatness due to its obvious PC roots. A missed chance. Close, but no cigar. I think you get my drift. Although if you do not have a new high spec pc, and only play games on a console, then it doesn’t get much better than this(you can add another point or two to the final score, ok!)