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Universal Combat: | ||||||||||||
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ay a guy comes up to you at the local canteen on Mars and says he has a starship you can have—no strings, right now, for free. The catch is, you have to figure out how to make it work, by yourself. Smart kid that you are, you grab the keys and dash over to stardock and your sleek new Command Craft. You climb onboard, take the captain's chair and—somewhat inelegantly—slip the station's moors. The only thing between you and a riveting career in space spelunking at this point is, well, figuring out what all those hundreds of tricky panels, levers, buttons and subsystems do.
This is the impetus (minus the bar scene) behind Universal Combat: A World Apart, a standalone update to last year's Universal Combat and the latest in an evolving series of complex space simulations from independent developer 3000AD. Set in a hypothetical version of our universe (including our solar system), UC:AWA bundles 238 planets, 96 starbases, over 14,000 military bases and tens of thousands of planetary "areas of interest" into a space simulation similar to "go anywhere, be anyone" classics like Elite, Privateer and Freelancer, but several orders of magnitude more complex.
In UC:AWA, players take full command of a starship, from the most trivial-sounding tasks, such as shuffling personnel between stations, to deploying probes, fighters and shuttles in a full-scale exploration of outer space. If captaining a vessel sounds tedious, players can relinquish control to junior officers (its own sort of gamble) and put on a flight suit to dogfight in one of the ship's many fighters. Players can also join away teams and venture out of orbit down to a planet's surface, where several types of tactical first-person assault, rescue and defend missions are available in full 3-D with latitude-specific weather effects.
Mimicking a massive parallel computing system in which individual nodes operate and learn independently, UC:AWA employs a neural-net artificial intelligence to dictate how system-wide events unfold. Whether you're pursuing a career as a pilot, a medic or a military marine, situations and AI behavioral responses develop without scripting or linear strictures. Thus while UC:AWA adds two new 16-mission campaigns, as well as 16 new instant-action scenarios, there is no real story to follow (the campaigns are basically chained-together missions), save for the one players create on the go according to their actions and the neural net's dynamic responses. Game modes include the campaigns, a sandbox "roam" option, instant-action space and land-based missions and a multiplayer option supporting up to 32 simultaneous players.
UC:AWA adds multiple new features, such as an enhanced graphical engine with full DirectX 9 support, shader-based lighting, glow and environment mapping, additional multiplayer features such as a server browser and two co-op multiplayer space-based scenarios, new first-person character models and improved planetary terrain and vegetation, and a variety of improvements to vehicle controls and dynamics. The game is primarily controlled using a keyboard and mouse, though joysticks and game controllers are also supported.
Delightful but a bit confusing
UC:AWA is something to be poked, prodded and pried open by a particular class of gamer who falls well outside the mainstream throw of the bell curve. The same sort of gamer might enjoy opening radios, televisions, car engines and microprocessors to see what makes them tick, or who, in the case of UCAWA, will enjoy as much the dozen purely mechanical steps involved in prepping a fighter to intercept an enemy squadron as the tactical maneuvering required by the dogfight itself. Graded on a scale that ignores mainstream conventions, UCAWA is at this point closing on respectable marks, if only because, despite its certifiably insane number of features, it often manages—however improbably—to deliver the goods.
For most, the notion of having to memorize hundreds of acronyms and learn the delicate intricacies of hundreds more systems and subsystems will sound like anything but fun. But try telling the astronauts who pilot the space shuttle that knowing every minute detail about the functioning of their craft is tedious and unexciting, and you will have some sense of what this game is driving at. Most people buy Microsoft's Flight Simulator for the pretty scenery, or to show off their new video card, but all the same, a niche group takes that game's attention to minute aeronautic detail seriously. The main difference is that Flight Simulator comes with most of its realism options disabled, while UC:AWA is hardcore from tip to toe.
To be sure, UC:AWA is still very much a work in progress, even by that special class of gamers' standards, as evidenced by the still-problematic planetary first-person interface and prettier but still clunky 2-D vegetation. Collision detection—a critical part of making first-person environments feel "real"—is still essentially absent, and movement is sluggish and prone to the same random lockups that plagued Universal Combat. There's also a host of nitpicky issues surrounding the organization of the interface (not the interface itself, which is clean and straightforward). It's been said before, but having to ALT-Q instead of simply hitting ESC to exit the game is unjustifiable, though it's equally unfair to say that things like this sink the game. They don't, and for patient gamers, the 101-page PDF manual and 97-page PDF tutorial do an excellent job of communicating how to unlock this somewhat eccentric time-gobbling monster of a simulation as well as have fun doing it (that is, again, if learning to manipulate complex subsystems as its own reward excites you).
Space navigation and combat—the heart of the game—are their own experience, and players can avoid landfall and its idiosyncrasies altogether if they so desire. Ship graphics and shading have been notably improved, and UC:AWA looks competitive enough measured against other independent efforts. One thing that badly needs overhauling is the rapid-motion cloud animations around planets, which often spin around an entire planet in bizarre one- or two-second intervals. Otherwise, things tend to work the way they're supposed to almost all of the time, and that's saying a lot for a game with literally thousands of spaceflight options. The game is also quite stable, though it has its share of behavioral bugs, such as ships ignoring commands or behaving erratically, even after the player performs a thorough check through all salient interdependencies.
It's almost criminal that so much effort by an independent developer has gone into such an ambitious albeit flawed game, and that the end product costs less than a cheap dinner for two. For the game's fanbase, UC:AWA needs no further recommendation. For the rest, be warned that extreme displeasure is a guaranteed reaction if polish, fast action and lots of typical hand-holding are requirements. If stamina and curiosity are available in abundance, however, skip that cheap dinner and give this one a long, patient look.
Some of you might remember the Battlecruiser 3000 debacle back in the 1990s—best to forget it and move on. Derek Smart and his team certainly have with the release of their latest simulation. This is space gaming for fans of Kim Stanley Robinson, Stephen Baxter and Geoffrey Landis. —Matt
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