Hegemonia: Legions of Iron Preview
We get an up-close look at this upcoming space strategy game from the creator of Imperium Galactica II.
Considering the subject matter, you'd think that large-scale sci-fi games that let you command huge fleets of starships in space would be far more common than they are. The very idea of commanding vast fleets of space-age fighter jets and battleships and conquering the galaxy has captured the imaginations of authors, TV producers, and filmmakers for years and has given rise to popular TV shows like Battlestar Galactica and movies like Star Wars. But creating a huge 3D version of outer space in a computer game, modeled down to every last little asteroid and spaceship, is an extremely ambitious task, and it was only first achieved a few years ago in Relic Entertainment's groundbreaking space strategy game Homeworld. Fortunately, developer Digital Reality is no stranger to this sort of challenge, having previously worked on the grand space strategy game Imperium Galactica II. The company's next project is a very impressive-looking strategy game called Hegemonia: Legions of Iron, a game that will have some of the best features of conventional real-time strategy, 3D tactical combat, and even some role-playing elements. Fortunately for us, the game's publisher, DreamCatcher Interactive, was kind enough to pay us a visit and give us a firsthand look at the game.
The story behind Hegemonia is rather simple, though it does tie in to the actual game mechanics. The game will take place far into the future, when human settlers of Earth have established colonies on Mars. After some years, friction builds between the Martian colonists and the Earth government and culminates in full-scale war--but the war is abruptly cut short by the appearance of a mysterious alien race that attacks both Earth and Mars and requires the warring factions of humans to put aside their differences and ally against their common enemy. Interestingly, that's why the game's lengthy single-player campaign, which can be played as the Earth incumbents or the Martian colonists, converges into a single structure. The first mission of either campaign will be entirely different, though afterward, the missions will eventually run together, since both factions will be fighting on the same side.
But the first thing you'll notice about Hegemonia probably won't be its campaign. That's because Hegemonia is actually a very impressive game, visually. Though we were assured by DreamCatcher that the game will scale itself to work on a fairly middle-of-the-road system with a GeForce3, the game is at its best on a high-end system with a powerful graphics card. Hegemonia will take advantage of all of the new features in DirectX 8.1--including vertex shading, pixel shading, and the latest lighting effects. The developer is also taking great pains to model a surprising amount of detail into the game.
As you might expect from a game like this, Hegemonia's graphics engine will use level-of-detail scaling that will let you command your fleets from a zoomed-out camera angle or zoom in extremely closely on your ships at any point in time to see the individual rivets and mounted weapons on each of them, much like in Homeworld. However, Digital Reality is also fully modeling all other objects in space, including individual starships and asteroids, as well as entire planets. Each planet will actually have a regular orbit and rotate on its axis and go through full day-night cycles--you'll even be able to see large-scale lighting on the dark side of the planet as its inhabitants start turning on their nightlights.
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- GameSpot Score7.9good
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Hegemonia: Legions of Iron Review
Hegemonia's solid, innovative gameplay and technically impressive graphics may seem very appealing to space strategy fans, but it's too bad that the game isn't more accessible and more polished.
- Dec 5, 2002
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