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To enjoy the game requires hours of exhaustive research and patience that most gamers don’t have.

Many gamers will want to enjoy Universal Combat, the next installment in designer Derek Smart’s Battlecruiser series. Unfortunately, doing so requires hours of exhaustive research and patience that most gamers don’t have.

The greatest strength of Universal Combat lies in its sheer depth. The game boasts an absolutely massive universe with hundreds of planets to explore and dozens of vehicles spread over land, space and air.

An intricate character creation system allows players to choose one of 12 races, each having unique qualities, such as race-specific ships and political relationships. From there, players can choose one of several classes available, all with their own duties, abilities and levels of access.

Want to command your own starship, complete with units you send into battle, or operate as a land soldier, firing at an opposing unit as you charge into the fray? Go right—actually don’t. That’s where Universal Combat goes horribly wrong.

How the hell do I play this game? You’ll ask yourself that question several times before furiously throwing the game across the room. First-time players who start the campaign mode will find themselves bombarded with confusing menus, an unfamiliar visual interface and acronyms that make no sense.

Good thing that there’s a 96-page manual so th—what? Ninety-six pages?! To make matters worse, the manual lacks a good sense of coherence (critical to any instruction book) and reads like a military guide: “Once the weapons computer verifies that the current target is a valid target, the MTD will be superimposed inside the TTD and the radar state will change to TRACK.”

The three-page sheet of hotkeys confounds players with counter-intuitive commands such as using alt-Q to quit instead of esc. Players cannot map commands to different keys, and there are so many commands listed that it intimidates players instead of helping them through the controls.

Speaking of help, the game offers absolutely none. You’ll be aching for some type of in-game tutorial or guide to assist in understanding even the most basic of controls. Be prepared to spend upwards of 15 hours trying to learn this game.

By making the game so hard to learn, the developer has alienated a large portion of its audience. I’m not saying that games must be pick-up-and-play easy, but there needs to be a balance between the tools of teaching and the amount of effort needed to understand the game. Universal Combat doesn’t pull its weight and ultimately drowns the casual gamer in a sea of acronyms and technicality.

Even after die-hard gamers get a rudimentary understanding of how to play Universal Combat, they’ll soon discover that the greatest strength of the game is also a crippling weakness. Sure, the game features a dizzying amount of ways to interact, explore and battle your way through the universe, but all of them have flaws.

The FPS aspect of ground combat lacks polish. Characters have the agility of bricks and their movement borders on hilarity (once my character jumped, he landed like he was stunned by the impact). This gameplay mode also lacks the advanced features of modern day first person shooters and is chock full of no-thrills combat devoid of advanced movement.

For Pete’s sake, you can’t even run and jump at the same time! You have to hold down the run button (shift), release it, and then hit the jump button (spacebar) to perform a running jump. It’s also a good thing that terrain advantages are nullified because you can just as easily walk through buildings as you can walk around them. Completely unacceptable.

Aerial combat is a slight improvement, but still seems off. Planes fly much too fast for any type of drama to build, as planes must make repeated turns to engage in split-second head-to-head combat. Arming the dreadfully inaccurate missiles is a chore as well, requiring far too much effort for the effect. Once the controls are mastered, flying becomes easier, but the whole event just feels average.

Space combat is the most engaging of the combat types. Playing as a commander of a large ship entertains as units can be given orders and sent off to do the dirty work. Commanders can also micro-manage their ships to a certain extent. Command brings a real sense of strategy to the game, but requires the most time to learn, which, in this case, means several hours. Unfortunately, travel across space takes considerable time, becoming both boring and bothersome.

The game is split into career mode, instant action mode and an open-ended roaming mode. The roaming mode presents players with just that, roaming. Although it is fun to travel across random planets in the universe, the lack of enemies and interactivity with the environment slightly disappoints. A multiplayer mode is available as well, but hosts are rare.

Universal Combat’s visual presentation disappoints when compared with today’s standards. However, that’s not to say that the game is ugly. Vehicle and spaceship models look pretty good. In fact, everything looks pretty good until the game starts moving. That’s when the choppiness sets in, which hurts the feel of the game. Terrain graphics as well have a gritty, pasted on look, probably from extensive compression.

Spaceships and planes look better. The space backdrop is impressive and planets have a certain degree of realness to their appearance, popping out of the backdrop nicely. However, sound effects in Universal Combat lack a sense of power and fall into generic laser zaps and explosions. The voice acting and musical score are decent, but soon fall into annoying repetition.

Universal Combat is what results when an overly-ambitious designer takes on a project too massive for its capabilities. Epic in their vision of what a game could be, the 3000 AD team wanted to make a game to end all games, one which appealed to fans across genres.
But, as the saying goes, if you try to please everybody, nobody will like it.


Review by Thomas Previte.