Posted on: January 4, 2011
Curunauth
Bestätigter BesitzerSpiele: 1226 Rezensionen: 23
Painfully slow, sometimes frustrating
I'm not very good at RTS games like StarCraft because they quickly become too fast for me to manage; a slower, more strategic game is exactly what I need. Alien Nations seemed like a good candidate, but it went way too far in the other direction, and flaws in the way units behave add needless frustration as well. During the early stages of a mission and sometimes during fights, the speed is just right, but overall, this game is *painfully* slow. The simple addition of a speed-up command would have made it tolerable or even fun, but in almost every mission, there are many long stretches of time where you must simply wait. If research could be queued, you could walk away from the machine; as it is, I got through many missions by reading a book and simply starting the next research when I heard a completion (or glanced up and noticed the helpful "you're not doing research" symbol). Against a computer opponent, you're effectively invincible once you build several towers, so in production-target missions, I could set up a basic town, actually walk away, and return to a victory screen - it's a bad sign when you complete a game by letting it play itself for half an hour (or longer!). The long stretches of waiting in the midgame were irritating enough, but even in combat missions, it is fairly easy to cripple the enemy so that he literally cannot win, and yet have 15+ minutes to go before you're done. Finishing a foregone conclusion should not take that long! The concept of issuing orders indirectly that your workers will fulfill on their own (building structures, harvesting food from farms) is a good one, but the implementation is at times frustratingly bad. There is no way to search for idle specialists, so when a lumberjack runs out of nearby trees, he may stand around doing nothing (possibly hidden behind a building) for quite a while before you notice that you're running low on wood. Food collection is a low-priority task for workers, even when the colony is starving. Worst of all, construction must compete with a variety of factory-type buildings for both wood and workers, and I had to shut down all of my industry on several occasions just to get a stalled building built. Workers can also get into logjams near storage buildings; one mission grants you an impressive army of workers at the start, and I could not build anything without repeatedly sending 4 groups of them on long trips away from the city. It took several minutes of doing this to get 3 storehouses set up, and throughout that mission I still had to break up other blocks of motionless drones (and then re-assign specialists I'd accidentally knocked off-task). Several interesting elements of civilization management are only saved from being painful by their tremendous lack of importance: rising populations demand various expensive buildings to keep them happy, as well as several types of produced goods. Fortunately, discontent has minimal effects, producing weak criminal units (solved by a police station), and causing minor damage to buildings over time. I soon realized that it was far cheaper to ignore my citizens' whining and eventually direct a small amount of money to contentment (which is both cheaper and easier than meeting their building demands). Starvation appears to reduce your population growth rate, but other than that isn't really an issue; in one mission where farming was disallowed, I spent a very long time in starvation with no trouble. Several of the story missions seem specifically designed to highlight the painful slowness of the game, and at least one is ridiculously difficult, with an lovely bonus of potentially becoming impossible to win without letting you know (you have to fetch some items to your original city, but if you missed that little detail, the game won't end when you lose that city - this allows you to spend hours completing the objective before realizing that it doesn't count). Since you suffer scripted attacks by a gang of top-tier units who destroy all training buildings and sometimes attack your Town Hall, starting less than a minute in, the only way to win seems to be using a set of terribly cheezy and labor-intensive exploits (eg keeping your town full of school building sites, which the enemy usually attacks first) for an upsettingly long time while building a second city *without agriculture*. Finally, the game is prone to crashes in a couple unfortunately common situations: save files from very long missions tend to crash the game when loaded, as does completing the final mission of any storyline (again seemingly time dependent). The latter can be dodged by using a mission-winning cheat-code before meeting the victory condition. Multiplayer might keep the midgame a bit more interesting by presenting an actual threat after you get towers, but can't solve the overall slowness, and I can't imagine that many people have the patience or time to play regularly. Overall: The primary, overarching problem with the game is the huge amount of time spent waiting between the enjoyable bits. The combat can be interesting when it happens, but that isn't very often, and the indirect control of your units would have been much better if they didn't have boneheaded priorities that frequently require slow manual intervention to get anything done. This poor AI decisionmaking extends to unchallenging computer opponents, and the missions tend to emphasize the painful parts of gameplay. Instead of winning missions by walking away and letting the game play itself, I suggest winning by walking away and buying a different game. 2/5 because it had some enjoyable bits and I got some reading time by playing.
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