The Audio, The Style, ***THE METAL*** and the Lore are all absolutely awesome. They all have that awesome Metal aesthetic, driven to the extreme. It's glorious, with awesome soundtrack, featuring many artists from multiple genres of metal. Pity the gameplay is kinda meh. It's an Open World game, with story missions. So, yo ucan just roam around looking for colectibles, places to buy upgrades, doing the side missions and fighting the ocassional roaming enemies. The car controls... are decent, the fact that you have a wide selection of Metal songs to play on the car's radio is one of teh highlights. The car has also some weapons, so oftentimes the combat will be you usiing your car's rocket launcher, or the externally mounted subwoofers, to kill stuff. In the rare occasions not spent driving the car, Eddie gets to swing his axe, and play the guitarr, chopping, electrocuting and burning his enemies, or melting their faces with a guiotar solo (Literally, by playing the "Facemelter" solo), speaking of guitar solos, these are kinda like spells, the aforementioned facemelter, buffing allies, summoning your car, calling a Lead Zeppelin to fall on the enemies... Then there are the dreaded "RTS" sections (the only multiplier mode). They are... not taht good. Maybe mediocre. Capture resource points. summon units, upgrade base, summon better units, send them to fight enemies, to get their resource poiints and then attack their base. The enemies also have their hero, wit htheir respective guitar solos. There are 3 factions, each wit htheier unique units and solos, though the campaign only follows one of them, the other 2 (and a reskin of the first) appear only as enemies.
Note that this review is based on the physical version I own, and not the terminal cut edition here. It feels a bit clunky sometimes, some bosses were anoying, and in a few places the game can leave you confused as to what to do. But regardless of the smaller issuer, it was enjoyable.
TA is a grand RTS. It might (and to be honest, is) my nostalgia talking, but only other RTS game that could stand somewhere near it is SupCom (Spiritual succesor of TA). (Honest warning: I'm writing what I remember from playing the game when I was ~7 years old) For the Features: -Unique resource system: Unlike most RTS games, Resources are generated over time by special buildings, like windmils, solar generators, and such for Energy, and Extractors for Metal, (and using a Windmill on an asteroid won't be really helpful). and building things uses up your resources gradually. (adds a negative "Income") and of course the more workers are building things, the faster it is built, but the greater the use of your resources (this applies to both buildings and units); On another hand even if you have 0 of everything and -100 income per second, you still can start building things, though It will take forever for them to be competed. -Units: there are a lot of them: several kinds of tanks, walking robots, planes, ships, and submarines. and that is only the base game: there are a lot more made by fans! (On another hand, this game allows you to have control over EVERY EXISTING UNIT (provided you manage to steal a "worker" from other faction (It's really fun to send a transport plane to the enemy base to kidnap their worker transport it to your Commander )), and there also is the Commander, powerful, slow, and crucial for the existence of your army (aka "You get him killed means you just lost" unit) which also explodes nicely when killed. -Buildings: Besides already mentioned resource buildings there are of course Factories (land, vehicle, air, ship)*2 (because there are "Upgraded" versions (I forgot the name) that produce different units) radars, radar jammers, turrets(several kinds), sonars, torpedo launchers (what? and how did you want to defend from the subs if not with torpedoes?), nukes (Oh the terror when you notice that the enemy has built a few nukes somewhere along the way...), and what I presume is a rocket defence (back then I never figured out how to use the damn thing). Besides EACH building has an animated model (You can see at a glance whether your windmills are producing energy, what (or whether something) is currently being built. Oh, and the 2 factions' units and buildings are distinct (though buildings may feel like reskins, since the do the exact same thing as their counterparts (or I failed to see the difference between them). (but on the other hand, what can you expect from a windmill? or a Solar Panel?
PROS: +Graphics are quite nice +It allows for much creativity in customising the creatures/buildings/vehicles. +Creature phase is probably the best one +I enjoyed playing it CONS: -Cell stage is... somewhat lacking -there is no aquatic stage -Creature Stage is short -Tribe&Civilisation stages are rather boring I can't say anything about the Adventures as I have yet to try them, and similarly the Space - I didn't really play much there... so I can't really say much about it
