Universal Combat Review

Space may be the final frontier, but there are still limitless games that concern it. Many PC gamers love to take command of star craft, space soldiers and advanced weapons, and test their skills in an endless expanse that is the cosmos. The real appeal of space may be that any kind of world is possible, and exotic races may be seen, and in the end, fought to the death! One of the more popular brand names in space games is the Battlecruiser series. and this game, Universal Combat, is the fifth generation of that title.

Universal Combat is very much a space combat simulator, with an astounding level of detail. There are no less then fifteen different scenarios, twenty five campaign missions, and there is all a roam mode to choose from. The choices for characters and ships is also extensive, and the game has few limits in its scope of detail.

Your character in the game can be one of three different types of military occupations, you can choose to be a Ship Commander, a pilot, and lastly, a Marine. Each career path includes a detailed experience, and all are different. The most difficult career is the Ship Commander, that choice requires a heavy level of detail, as all aspects of ship operations is at your command (with an astonishing number of keyboard shortcuts and commands, I might add). As a ship commander, your star vessal can go anywhere, but you must tend to navigation, crew, weapons and engineering. The pilot is the intermediate career in level of difficulty, you will command a small fighter and patrol sections of space where you are assigned. This career includes dog fighting and other such things pilots in space must face. The final career path, the Marine, is the most limited in where you go. The Marine is assigned to a planet or a space station, but you get to handle the games' best hand weapons, and the action is more personal on his level then the other careers.

Once you have a career, you must select a race from the twelve provided.The races have different feelings for each other, some are allied and others are not so friendly. You must also select a specialty, such as Assassin or a raider. This can play into the game, the races react differently to different specialties, for example, most races respect the healing arts, but take a dim view of raiders.

The game's level of depth is displayed in the large number of ship types that players will control and fight at some point. There are ocean going ships, space cruisers, fighters, submarines, even transports play their part, and there are better then one hundred ship types available. The ship commander can leave his ship at times, and take shuttles and fighters out for a spin, and down to planets. On planets, you will be jet assisted in getting around.

One of the main problems I had with this game is the extreme learning curve for it. There are no tutorials at all, and the game manual is quite large, and often not very clear. If you are going to get anything out of this game at all, expect to put an extreme amount of time into learning the basics of it, this isn't a game you can just fire up and play, it takes a lot of learning to get control over what you are doing.

The game play in the careers is fun however, once you begin to get passed the steep learning curve. Ship commanders have to deal with all the things we would assume would happen in space, like enemy interceptions, raiders boarding the ship, transporting prisoners to different systems, as well as some other things, such as the crew's moral, if they are properly quartered, the maintenance of shuttles and fighters, and, of course, the ship's engines and weapons. You stay on the bridge and give orders, and the ship reports how the orders are carried out, the AI will handle a lot of these tasks.

The look of the game is what one would expect of a space simulator. There are two view modes, ship view and first person. The FP has a display along the bottom of the screen so you can keep track of weapons, ammo, armor, health and life support. The ship displays the capabilities of the selected vessal, with ship functions to the left, standard info displays in the center, and fighters, shuttles and the main computer on the right. The ship's computer can handle a lot of tasks in the game, including most of the minutia of ship operations. The ship and FP screens are good, but not perfect, the ships seems a bit blocking and don't flow well, the FPS mode is ok, just not outstanding. The graphics of the game are definitely not on the same level as the detail included.

The game's music track is decent, but the effects could have been a lot better. Many of the sounds seem rather subtle, maybe this is a good thing, but I prefer a game to be a bit more, shall we say, 'colorful' in its sound effects. There are few voice overs, limited to alerts, so don't expect a lot of that, this is more a simulator then a role playing type of game.