An alien race in search for their Homeworld
You begin the game by launching a Mothership, this is the heart of your force, this space station allows the player to build and construct a fleet of fighters and other battleships. The mothership is stationary at the only time that she is able to move is when she activates hyperspace and transporting from mission to mission.
You force will get attacked and ambushed by bandits and other forces across the galaxy, this is how the missions usually start and end up being played, as you go across the galaxy, missions also include the offence missions as you go ahead on destroy outposts for a particular purpose.
The game is in full 3D, the first strategy game to do this, everything from the ships, rocks and debris is rendered in full polygons, colour coated with textures. As it's in 3D, you can click on the ships and press F to focus onto that particular ship. This can make controlling a ship or a group of ships easy. The player can also group ships together by selecting a group of them and pressing control and a number, also setting formations and they're attitude towards hostiles from evasive, natural and aggressive is also present in the game and does drastically effect the outcome of battles, as setting evasive mode on fighters to tackle battleships or frigate will be more effective in deciding victories.
The controls are the game is straight forwards as the tutorial teaches the player from camera control and building units and formations. This is very handy for first time players.
Also interface can be bought up on the bottom of the screen, with buttons ranging from build, research, sensors, hyperspace jump and a message box with the list of objectives are displayed.
The build buttons brings up a screen, allows you to build fighters, frigate, destroyers along with other units, also non combat units such as resource collectors, probes and research ships. All these units every in function and its purposes and really do contribute to the games balance of the gameplay as you can have fighters effective against battleships or destroyers effective against carriers or other capital ships.
Researching technologies after building a research ship, allow you to grow your force, this technologies will effect which fighters you can build in the game, after a few missions you will have a growing amount of technologies. This will be useful to many of the challenges you will come across in the missions ahead.
The sensor screens zooms out to a huge overlay, the simple colour coding of Green meaning players units and red enemies units clearly shows what happening in the environment around you, the sensors also senses asteroids for resource collectors and debris of spaceships or other objects in the galaxy
Finally when you complete the mission, hyperspace ship gathers up all the ships and docks them or lines them up preparing them for the next mission, this can take a while, luckily the developers added a 'Quick docking' button, which allows the fleet to automatically dock and jump to the next mission.
As I mentioned, the units have there fair share of range and abilities, in the build screen, they display how strong their armour is, along with speed. Difference ability types include capturing, cloaked units, special sensors to detect enemy cloaked units along with weaponry such as Ion cannons and missile destroyers. So there a lot to play with and a good opportunity to be creative with the strategies you can employ.
Some of the challenges in the game are more then just beating the other units and winning the war, sometimes you have to deal with environmental hazards, such as radiation, meteors or even enemy scramblers deputing your sensors which varies from mission to mission.
When you start the game, you can select between two 'alien' races which are the Kushan or Taiidan, despite them all having the same stats in the unit types, the difference is the modelling set for each units that makes each race unique.
The other unplayable forces in the game have their own set of models for units, which make them unique, this makes the world much more in-depth and fresh to what the player will experience in the game.
The player can also select the main and stripe colour of there units in the game, at the beginning, an extra feature to satisfy the players taste in colours.
Multiplayer is also in the game, as those units and options are from in the single player game is transferred in the, allowing you to set up your own deathmatches and space battles, You can set up a limited amount of resources to be used after a certain amount of minutes.
The graphics are the time were superb, being in full 3D, and the textures are really good, speciality when using the Direct3D mode, as it blends all the textures together make the whole setting make immersive, from the beautiful backgrounds to the ships textures.
The sounds are great, ship explores, engines, interface buttons, it's all fits in together. The voices on every unit is the same, however they all say something different and unique depending on the situation, nice touch to detail. I was around 10 hours into the game and found unit responding and saying different things.
The cutscenes are great and put together, really cool drawings and presents the whole story well as you play the entire game as you transport from mission to mission.
There a few problems, some missions take AGES to complete, as much as the battles get epic, some units such as the battleships and destroyers can take ages to drive across from side of the map to the other, also some of the final missions are extremely long. Sometimes the shorter missions leave resources which can be collected and used in the later missions. Sometimes I had to wait until all the resources got collects before moving onto the next mission.
If you enjoy the single player game, the multiplayer will add a lot more value, along with range line of units and experimenting with strategies in the game. Both races do have their own unique units so playing the campaign twice as both races will offer a difference experience.
Other then those minor flaws, the game is epic. All real time strategists should get this game. It in the bargain bins now, it worth investing into, along with the mods being developed and released, there a lot more value after playing this game.