It’s been a dry time for us demo fanatics on Xbox Live. Sega felt compelled to quench our thirst yesterday with a demo for Universe at War: Earth Assault. This is the latest attempt at a PC RTS game on the console. Did they succeed? In a way.
Just like monkeys creating tools to perform tasks, it’s just not the same as the real thing. Join me after the jump.
The controls work, with as limited as they are. The Right Trigger zooms into the minimap for quick movement around the terrain, which indeed makes travel quick, it’s anything but easy. During the tutorial level, I found it difficult to use this function to precisely land in the designated circles to move my troops around. While it worked, it made me yearn for a mouse, so in a sense it didn’t work quite as well as intended.
Everything else works just as you would expect it to. Left Trigger is the activation menu, Right Bumper brings up your control groups, and Left Bumper is the customization menu. The menus and group controls actually work quite well, making it easy and quick to do whatever you need to do within them. The biggest problem with the game, in my opinion, is the cursor movement, which PC RTS fans simply won’t be able to get over.
Console RTS games are getting ever closer to that perfect formula. Universe at War looks like it will be a fine addition to any collection, but there will be some frustration involved, especially if you’ve ever played an RTS on the PC. If you absolutely have to get your RTS fix on the Xbox 360, you could do alot worse.
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5 responses so far ↓
1 LJ // Apr 15, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Hooray for not sucking!
2 Dejanus // Apr 15, 2008 at 7:00 pm
The whole thing seemed kind of drabto me after playing World in Conflict for the PC.
I am spoiled, I guess.
By the way, I gather from screens and video that WiC might be the first game to get the controls right for consoles.
3 darkwonders // Apr 15, 2008 at 8:12 pm
or they could just make it for the PS3 and actually have a mouse and keyboard function…
4 the 6th degree // Apr 16, 2008 at 1:45 am
Did anyone else think the troops were way too small to tell the difference between them?
I spent like 10 mins in the tutorial looking for the construction unit…really didn’t like.
5 Animathias // Apr 16, 2008 at 6:26 am
@6th Degree: Unless you’re on a decent resolution display not too far away from you.. yes. I played this on my computer monitor which was pretty close, and I didn’t have too much trouble, then I tried it on my standard def and it was impossible. I imagine a large High Def would have problems too.
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