Good game if you actually could play it... for some people like me, this game will be unplayable due to incompatability!
1. This game works for many people, unfortunately i'm not one of those
2. My hardware is very good, 8800ultra, 3ghz quad, 4gb ram, vista, all latest drivers
3. I have not played through the whole singleplayer campaign because i can't due to crashes
After installing this game i got crashes 3-4min into playing. After a few days i read somewhere that installing microsoft live v1.2 would help, and it did. But the crashes never told me that... wish it did...
Now being able to actually play past prelude before crashing i was really into this game! I like the easy micromanagement of your units (although its hard to find them on the map), it makes the game very satisfying when you can controll each unit group by itself while it is in a big group of different units! By doing this you can decimate your opponent if done correctly (ie lots of small ohm bots versus a big walker)!
The graphics are nice to look at playing at maximum settings, but its not terrific or anything. Music is good imo, its action-oriented with heavy guitar riffs! But the speech sounds are really hard to hear most of the time, even though i turned all the other sounds down to 80 while having speech sound at 100! This is bad as you loose key element chattering and therefore loos details of the story.
The hud could have been done alot better! On the hud, you got pictures of your heroes and pictures of your build buildings, your constructors and your units special abilities. Plus a minimap, and your resources and build cap. Thats it! No button to attack or defend or whatsoever! As of right now there are no way to defend a certain unit, control a perimeter by patrol, queue up constructors to build buildings and the like. Really bad...
And more importantly you are severely limited in your zooming abilities! You can zoom out a bit, but not much! If you're playing hierarchy, when you zoom out max, your walker covers up 80% of the screen... not good!
It is really annoying if you're used to other rts where you can zoom out to take a quick tactical overview of the battlefield and to move your troops over moderate distances while having an eye on them!
The game got great factions because they play NOTHING alike! But right now hierarchy (the faction with the big walkers) are really overpowered because their basic grunts are uberpowerful and their walkers too. Unless you got some heavy defense and tons of units at your disposal 3 walkers will totally own you and your base! Not good!
This game would have gotten 8-9 from me if i could actually play it without crashes... but I cant...
Here'st he deal:
* Doesn't install windows live 1.2 properly so you will crash after 2-4min of playing unless you manually install windows 1.2 (after uninstalling the other version). Doesn't even tell you that windows live is the cause of the crashes!
* But once installed the game will crash randomly after 1-1,5hours of playing straight (seems to be crashing when you have the most fun too)
* Crashes 2-3 seconds after loading a saved game (but if you open menu by pressing ESC you don't crash until you resume game) so save function does, in other words, not work. If you have less than 10 units then the load function will not crash the game... (other people have confirmed this)
* Freezes your computer sometimes so you have to reset
* Petroglyph staff at the forums just ask you to post speccs and shaite but dont do anything and say something like "we can't recreate your problem, because we run an updated version that got different coding"... wtf, then maybe you should run the same version as you're selling?
So it gets 6.5 from me because i can't play plus other bad stuff i already explained! It's fine if you don't agree about the score, but rate it if you think this review was helpful to you!