Not Another Starcraft

Universe at War: Earth Assault (Xbox360: March, 2008) Listen to this post

I tried really, really hard to ignore my initial doubts and finish this game. From the moment I turned it on, I was stifling the urge to kill myself in order to escape the torture, but, unfortunately, I caved after about four or five levels and promptly lifted the Xbox360 from the TV stand and hurled it off a cliff. I then cackled gleefully as I watched the massive piece of machinery tumble and transform into a fiery hunk of wreckage. Okay, I added the fire myself, but it did the rest all on its own.

Universe at War is a blatant ripoff of Blizzard's legendary StarCraft, however, SEGA decided to change things just a little by putting the game on a console. At least, that's what I thought, until I realized the console version is a port from the PC, originally released in December of 2007. Apparently they weren't paying attention to the fact that Blizzard tried to do the whole port-a-PC-game with the original StarCraft years ago and failed miserably. History repeats itself, ladies and gentlemen.

This game deserves nothing more than to burn in hell for all eternity. That's putting it mildly. Sega took the three races from StarCraft, kept the same basic unit types, and changed the aliens to robots. They didn't even come up with a new name for the humans; they're still Terrans. But, even their blatant theft would've been acceptable if they had made a decent game. Instead, they created a nightmare: a self-indulgent pile of crap that makes little attempt to even tell you what you're objectives are with a difficulty curve that starts out at the boring tutorial level and by the second or third mission has already reached infinity and beyond.

The biggest flaw in this RTS is the same as any RTS that's ever existed on a console: the controls. An all-purpose button doesn't really do much for you when the cursor is guided by a joystick. I can't wait until the day comes that developers realize the hard truth that RTS games and consoles don't mix. Sorry, Halo Wars, but all I'm gonna say when you suck is "I told you so." You can't compete with the power of a two-button+ mouse and a full-size keyboard. That silly little thing that Microsoft calls an Xbox360 controller just isn't capable of doing things like simple little micro-management.

If you ever get possessed to try this game, do yourself a favor: take a cigarette, light it, and jam the lit end into your left nostril. That will bring you less pain in a fraction of the time than Universe at War.

Overall score: 2 out of 10. It gets that much because had I tried this on the equipment it was intended to be played on originally (a PC), I might have actually been able to play through more than half of it.