f13.net

Let me start off by saying I'm not a huge RTS fan.  I loved Dune back in the day, and enjoyed Warcraft, and Starcraft well enough, but after playing Myth, I had trouble going back to strategy games that required a lot of resource gathering.  Still,  is made up of a lot of former Westwood people, and the overall story and concept of Universe at War at least had me interested in picking up the demo.

The demo consists of a tutorial, as well as a couple missions with the Hierarchy (aliens that are trying to conquer the Earth).  From what I can tell, there's nothing too distinctive about the gameplay that really sets it apart from other RTS games.  There are some massive units (one of the giant alien walkers has multiple upgrade points on its body that you can add weapons or armor to), and even most of the grunt units seem to have some special attacks that you can buy, but overall it feels like the RTS we've been playing since the early ‘90s.

What the game does have going for it, is personality.  It's hard to not give some points to a game that consists of Aliens vs. Giant Robots vs. a race of aliens that have been living on Earth and appear to have been the basis of Greek mythology, and the art style for the Nov us (robots) and Hierarchy (Aliens) seems particularly well done.  I'm not entirely sold on the Masari yet, but as the faction that is supposed to be the most mysterious, they don't really have any sort of presence in the demo.

By no means a bad game, but I likely won't pick up the retail version until it drops in price a bit.  The story seems interesting enough that I'd like to see where it goes, but not to the extent that it overcomes the ambivalence I have towards RTS's in general.
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Demo It

Myth ruined RTS for me too, fucking Bungie, I'm not sure I'll ever forgive them and I can't even count the number of places on the doll they touched me.  If it wasn't on my top20 list it was damn close.  It was on my top20 list, fucking loved Myth.  The only bad thing was once you hit crown everyone became a bitch trying to setup only stacked fights.

King of the Hill may have been the best gametype ever.  Fucking so many awesome games on the one map where the hill was really the bottom of that bigass bowl.

Damn I miss dwarven sappers. Oh and stashing undead in the water and then flanking people. Now that's a game that needs a sequel. You're free now Bungie, get to it!

Amazon is selling this for $9.97 (http://www.amazon.com/Universe-At-War-Earth-Assault/dp/B000R2WI0G/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1214300542&sr=8-1).  Worth picking up at that price.