Waging traditional real-time war with a notably nontraditional interface (a gamepad in lieu of a keyboard and mouse), players can slip into the fracas by way of a two-and-a-half-part solo campaign, or wage "Conquer the World" battles against others online. The campaigns offer six or seven mission samples of the Novus and Hierarchy factions, with an abbreviated peek at the Masari intercut by a free-form, Risk-like mission mode staged around a partitioned globe before the final ribbon-tied wrap-up. "Conquer the World" translates that Risk-style map into a personal progress tracker online, whereby players can battle others waiting in contested territories to do battle. Polishing off the globe as any single faction resets the map for that faction but raises the stakes by doubling territorial losses in a skirmish defeat.

The gamepad shorthands the PC version's keyboard and mouse by letting players issue context-sensitive commands from quick-select roll menus that encapsulate pretty much any instruction. Unit selection and tracking, technology queueing, special ability execution and more are all swiftly selectable from a command wheel that shrinks or expands contextually. Pivoting, zooming or zipping around the map is managed elegantly and generally precisely with the thumbsticks, and the gamepad's left and right triggers and shoulder buttons work as passable stand-ins for hotkey shortcuts on a keyboard. Even theoretically complex functions like custom-building teams, which here involves holding down a button and panning a cursor to tag units into a squad, are easily mastered after a few minutes of practice.

Performance at war

Sadly—very sadly—Universe at War may turn out to be the single worst Xbox 360 game yet released. Not because it's a fundamentally bad game (it's not, not by a long shot). Not because it has show-stopping bugs (it has none, by my count). Not because it's too easy or creatively dull or mechanically derivative (actually it kind of is that last, but in a wonderfully deliberate and celebratory sort of way). No, Universe at War for the Xbox 360 wins the video game equivalent of a Golden Raspberry because it takes an actually quite good real-time strategy PC game with clever winks and nods at the rest of the genre and beyond, then traps it under the glass of a grotesquely faltering translation.

Meaning? That this version of Petroglyph's sleek intergalactic real-time strategy game has all the performance characteristics of a Ferrari pinioned in neutral, a stutter-show that actually lives down to the overused throwaway tag phrase "slideshow." Picking on a game for performing poorly can seem petty, but to make too little of the frame rate issues in this one would be criminal. Here it devastates the gameplay, makes the campaign virtually unplayable, annihilates even a die-hard's ability to play competently online and squanders all the good will mustered by its otherwise commendable gamepad controls. Put another way, even the Dalai Lama wouldn't enjoy this game with extra buckets of tenacity and miles of patience.

To call the whole affair terribly disappointing is probably euphemistic for what's been lost here, because everything else about Universe at War is good verging on great. The Novus, Hierarchy and Masari are supremely well balanced and thoroughly mineable in terms of tactical and technological breadth. The Novus' "flow" network, which eliminates sneaker time by enabling units to swiftly criss-cross areas along beam-lit poles, for instance, seems practically inspired and a deadly knife in the back for anyone who's not monitoring a map's back doors. The campaign itself may be too short and logistically a little bland, but the ability to take all this online and play endlessly against other Xbox 360 or PC owners—yes, it's multiplatform—could and should have been brilliant.

But it's not, and don't even think about trying the game online against a competent PC version owner. There's enough of a learning curve getting your hands around the gamepad that the fatal slowdown issues make it certifiably impossible to best someone with a keyboard and mouse. That said, I can recommend the PC version of Universe at War without apologies, and I only wish Sega had afforded Petroglpyh the time necessary to oil up the console version's engine somehow.