Lack of Polish suppresses originality once again

User Rating: 7.5 | Universe at War: Earth Assault PC
Seeing as it was Petroglyph's first original, own ip based game, I was pretty interested in the game for quite some time. After, finally getting a chance to play this it has been a mixed bag.

Throughout the single player campaign you will be constantly be reminded of two contrasting things - how much original, interesting stuff is there in the game and how much polish it lacks.

There are lots of interesting stuff in the game and each race felt fun and unique to play. Walkers are one of the most interesting units in any rts ever. It's as much fun to play using the Walkers and wreaking havoc on your enemies as it is using your forces effectively to take them down (gives a great feeling of accomplishment). Other units are also pretty interesting. Building up the supply lines network intelligently of Novus and using them to quickly move around is really awesome. The Masari, though a bit conventional, also had interesting elements like using light/dark modes as per requirements . In short all the factions offer a lot of interesting options and are quite a bit of fun to play

Moving to the other part the of the game, that is the lack of polish. The units are really difficult to control and use. It feels clunky to to move the units around and the gameplay suffers quite a bit because of that. It's also pretty difficult frustrating to do simple stuff to manage unit groups, see the units currently selected etc. camera controls are similarly awkward. there are few bugs also in the the game, one especially frustrating bug was crashing after 10 secs of loading saved game (was later on fixed in a patch - so this patch could be essential for some)

The single player campaign is pretty standard although the missions for each factions themselves are pretty interesting. The story while also pretty simple progresses nicely and is decent enough to provide enough motivation to finish the game. The last faction campaign consists of conquer the world types of missions where you conquer one territory after other, and you can go by shortest rote or take your time by first controlling all the neighboring territories. this mode though pretty simple helps keeping the thing fresh

Didn't played a lot of multiplayer because of games for windows crap, but from what I played the game seems to have lots of interesting strategic options. Graphics are decent and I personally liked the unit art design.

It felt like a shame that while the game offers original stuff while at the same time it forgets to offer basic stuff which are common in most of the rts nowadays

I just noticed one thing - the GS score, avg score, user score and my socre all are approximately same