Posted on: July 27, 2012
Mumb00
Jeux: 178 Avis: 1
Very compelling, but for a very specific type of player.
So far, every review before this one has 5-starred it, and I want very badly to agree. The graphics are about as good as anyone has any right to expect, and then some. It's mission requirements are varied and rarely ever repetitive. It offers the chance for pulling some really slick tactics, and you will need to know how to use them since this is simply not the kind of game where you just point your ships at an enemy and tell them to attack it until it blows up (beautifully!), and the fact that you have Baldur's Gate-style pause-and-play to help issue orders at whatever pace with which you are comfortable keeps it from being too overwhelming. That said, my gripes, some petty, some less petty, keep that last star off. First, for all of the tactical options it offers you, it seems to expect you to find precisely the right one, which results in there being much less flexibility than it seems. In that sense, it plays more like a puzzle where you will have to find the right solution. If you don't, you will likely end up having to restart and try something perhaps completely different. Second,and this is kind of an extension of the first, there is no mid-mission saving, and when you couple that with some unforgiving, difficult stealth-type missions which require you to go very slowly, this almost guarantees that you will restart several times and be forced to go through the same boring sequence until you "crack the puzzle." Third, for some of the similarities that this shares with a Homeworld-style game, it's a shame that free-form movement is so much more difficult here than it is there. You almost are stuck telling your ships to go someplace that is either marked by a waypoint, or occupied by another object. While you do have the ability to place your own waypoints, it's very clunky and non-intuitive. It discourages you from going off the beaten path, I guess. Anyway, that's the stuff of substance. The petty stuff: voice acting, while not bad, can get somewhat annoying, especially from the alien characters, and when you have to listen to the same exchanges while restarting certain missions to find the right solution, it will probably become rather tiresome. The stuff that's not quite so annoying is mainly just competent. I found the best examples to be the Captain's Log entries during the cinematic interludes to be the best. For all the time I've spent griping about this stuff, it probably looks strange to see a 4-star rating. The simple fact is, I do happen to like puzzle games and as a result, I have developed quite a bit of patience for this sort of thing. And the payoff, the last few missions' brilliant set-piece battles, totally makes it worth it for me. Space battles are practically pr0n for me, and I'm willing to put of with a lot to get them. Ultimately, this delivers precisely that, and for those that have the same kind of patience as I do, maybe all the stuff that I've been yipping about won't matter that much. Definitely plenty of pro over con, and it really was one of the best-looking games that came out that year. More games should be using that graphics engine, and we need more tactical space-battle games that are as nuanced as this.
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