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War on the planet of Saraksh can be brutal, with domination
of the planet being contended by four factions. Throwing muscle
and steel at each other, power alone will not guarantee victory,
only the right strategy will win the day...
Galactic
Assault: Prisoner of Power is a new turn-based science
fiction strategy game created by Wargaming.net and published
by Paradox Interactive.
Anyone
who is as deeply encrusted with the dust of time as myself
will remember many a wasted youthful evening pulling out large
maps covered in hexes and using small bits of cardboard to
take over the world... Ah, the world before girls. Things
have, oddly enough, not moved on very far and I find myself
being grateful. The paper has been replaced with a 3D environment
and the little cardboard pieces are now tanks and men that
you can throw at your A.I. opponent.
As
a genre RTS (Real Time Strategy) has had a good history, initially
turning up on early computers and being little more than graphical
representations of the original board games, things became
more interesting with the advent of Dune 2 and finally
exploded onto the scene with the still alive and kicking Command
and Conquer series of games.
It
would be fair to say that the market has matured and the elements
that make up RTS games have changed little. You still have
a building stage, in many you have to micro manage the acquisition
of resources and when all that is done you get to build your
world dominating army, before setting off to, hopefully, kick
the bejesus out of your opponent.
Unsurprisingly,
Galactic Assault has many of these elements and why
not? After all it's what we love about these games. The game
is played across a single campaign which has been segmented
into four chapters; add the eleven unrelated scenarios and
you have a lot of game play time.
The
manual is nice and clear, but to honest is only useful for
discovering some of the nuances of the game as there are comprehensive
tutorials contained in the first seven missions, which gets
you up and running very quickly. The main controls are minimal
and most build, move and fire controls can be accessed through
the mouse. I found this particularly useful as it drives me
insane playing games that seem to feel the need to use the
whole of the keyboard, leaving you spending too much time
ploughing through the manual just to execute a simple manoeuvre.
For many this simplicity of approach may seem like condescension,
however there are many gamers, myself included, who would
rather just get on with the strategy side of things, rather
than micro managing an economy.
You
get four different nations to play with; The Land of the Unknown
Fathers, The Khonties, The Insular Empire and The Barbarians.
Each has slightly different strengths and weaknesses as well
as units which are peculiar to each of the combatants.
The
game has a nice set of playing options from the single person
campaign, scenarios and death matches as well as the option
to play with real people on the Internet. This means that,
thankfully, for once the single player gets the lion's share
of game play.
In
campaign mode there is a story, of sorts, to keep you focused
on your objective, though the narrative is one of the weakest
elements of the game. Graphically the game is a reasonable
compromise between detail and the desire to run the game on
a reasonable spec machine, without it grinding to a halt.
Overall,
this is a good game for novices. More advanced players might
be irritated by some of the compromises that have been made,
but then there are other games for them. Personally, I quite
enjoyed it.
Charles
Packer
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£24.99
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£24.99
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£29.99
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All prices correct at time of going to press.
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