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Game Reviews, Games

Supernova: Galactic Wars (PC) Review

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Developer/Publisher: Winter Wolves || Overall: 4.5/10

Space. Never mind how we got there, but do mind that there are two warring factions: the Blood Legion and the Blue Army. Now I don’t exactly know whose army the Blue Army is, but I’m sure they could’ve made up a better name than the Blue Army for their army.

SuperNova: Galactic Wars is a mediocre representation of a form of “galactic chess” which tries to toss in some sort of strategy, and “arcade fun” with real-time battles. However, the end package ends up becoming something not worth too much of your time, nor will it even take up that much on the other hand either.

Graphics: What is that? Oh, It’s a spaceship…I think…
In terms of graphics, the game’s menu screens have more detail than the amount of detail in-game ships have. Graphics are not that good at all, but still manage to get the job done without having any bad memories of it. Everything is smooth for the most part, but there isn’t any animation to really speak of except for lasers going in a straight line and a picture of a missile moving around, or a ship glowing with a shield. The game boasts no lag time, however.

Music: This is a one song soundtrack
When it comes to sound, it is not noticeable at all except during the menu screen. The music is pretty boring, and doesn’t exactly fulfill much more than being a fill-in for the sake of something actually being there. I’m pretty sure that the same song is used repeatedly through the whole game in all the different situations you go through.

Galactic Chess, a wonderful premise! Not really…
The whole premise of the game is that there’s a blue team and a red team, and they’re fighting. Each side has unique ships, in different classifications, such as scout, cruiser, battleship, and interceptor. Each side has their own repertoire of ships to boast, each with somewhat cool names and somewhat cool designs. You will notice by playing the game that each side have ships mostly named after a classification of certain things that have some sort of relation with another. A few of the Blue Army’s ship names are Tornado, Shark, Dolphin, Stinger, Scarab, Eagle, and Arrow, while the Blood Legion’s ships are named Spinner, Ogre, Crab, Panthera, Turtle and Lightning.

It is pretty obvious what each ship’s counterparts are, by the kind of weaponry they use. This is simply because of balance issues, and either side really doesn’t have much more to offer over the other side, other than just a variety in the style of ships and what each weapon may be paired with. There are a few unique weapons to particular ships, but these will have counterparts as well. The best part about this game is the pure variety of the ships that have been included in the game for each side.

While not totally boring, SuperNova does deliver a somewhat amusing experience with the real-time battles that can only be accurately described as an Asteroids-type of game, except there is another ship that you duel with. However, the whole game isn’t exactly like this. You play a form of Chess on a map with a bunch of hexagonal spaces that are occupied by your ships and your opponent’s ships. You are usually on one side while your opponents are on the other.

The game is based around turns when it comes to how the game is structured. You are allowed to make only one action during your turn before you give your opponent a chance to do something. Every turn you get to move, repair, or buy a new ship. Different challenges are given that make you have to use your turns wisely, or else you’ll fail the mission.

While you’re in Chess board mode, you can spend “credits” to repair ships that have been dealt damage during the real-time battles, or buy new ships. New ships can only be bought when one of your ships are occupying a planet, with the most basic ship costing ten credits (each ship above it costing ten more). When you have a ship occupying a “Gaia” you acquire credits depending on the planets wealth. You also acquire credits during real-time battles, as they’re just pieces of different colored (and valued) gook flying around on the game screen.

To enter a real-time battle from the Chess board mode, a ship must land on top of a square that has another ship from the opposing army on it. As I said before, this mode is most closely described as an Asteroids-type of game where you duel with an enemy instead. Though you may not actually get much frustration out of it unless you adjust the computer’s difficulty really high, it is not a very involving feature of the game, nor is anything else about the game once you think about it. In the real-time battle screen, you’re presented a map of the area you’re allowed to fight in (I say allow because there’s a wall surrounding it), randomly flying around asteroids and rocks, and gook credit things. You fly around shooting things and that’s basically it. You can acquire power ups by destroying the asteroids and fight your opponent. Fighting your opponent becomes very annoying and long because it is not too much fun at all. Its so much easier if you are able to just ram into your opponent, and destroy it like that instead of using your guns. Unless of course your opponent has more hit points left, then you would use more than one of your ships to kill it.

In terms of actually playing the game, that is all that the game has to offer.

Story? What story?
Unfortunately, there is a very boring story mode in which you have no actual reason for fighting the other side other than the fact that you’re trying to do something and they’re not allowing you to do it. The “story” is delivered through text, and you only see one person representing the other side. The graphics used to make the people are actually nice, but that’s probably because the rest of the game is pretty much crap.

There are about ten missions you have to go through, each forcing you to exhibit some sort of strategy (or make you retry the level over and over until you get lucky), which ends up being not very hard to figure out at all. Once you actually beat the game you get nothing more than a “congratulations, you helped us out” sort of thing, and that’s about it. No extras, no real incentive for ever playing the game again after beating it for each side. Sure there’s the “quick battle” option but its just the same boring game again.

Though there are two campaigns you can go on, one for each side (each with different stories), it will not take you that long to complete either campaign. It took me a little under an hour to complete the Blue Army’s campaign, and half of the Blood Legion’s.

Overall Thoughts
SuperNova: Galactic Wars should not mislead you into thinking there is more than one war. There is only one war, and it’s extremely sad, intensely boring, and not worth your time at all. One would think that the game’s price tag of $19.95 (online) would be comparable to paying a hundred dollars for a new pair of underwear. Once you play this game, you won’t go back to it, as it has nothing more to offer you other than a semi-hot-looking Queen of the Blood Legion that gives you orders to kill the blue guys on the map.

Game Reviews, Games

Jets’n’Guns (PC) Review

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Developer/Publisher: Rake In Grass || Overall: 9.0/10

Jets’n’Guns is a side-scrolling shooter, very similar to games like R-Type. Everything in the game, including its gameplay, graphics, music and nifty little innovations, make Jets’n’Guns one of the best space shooters I’ve ever played.

If you took World War II planes, equipped them with homing rockets, megaton bombs, and lots of other flashy weaponry and put them in outer space, you have Jets’n’Guns. This game is all about saving a professor named von Hamburger, and killing a huge force of Pirates (called the Xoxx), and occasional bug-type aliens (for about two levels), to save him.

Von Hamburger is more than just a scientist that makes a mean Teriyaki Hamburger. He helped the Xoxx’ Pirate leader/captain guy to create a huge cannon that has the potential to destroy the universe. Of course, it’s up to you to save the professor, kill the pirates, and kill the Pirate leader.

When you start out the game, you have a dinky little ship that has one gun on it. You don’t start out with much money to fool around with, as this is one ridiculously hard game. After losing about ten times on the normal difficulty setting, I set it down to the “easy” setting. Even though it was easier, it was still pretty damn hard.

Every level you progress to presents new challenges, different enemies, different areas, more weapons, and much more and as you advance, things get more frantic, forcing you to invest your money wisely. Luckily for the player, when we buy and then sell weapons back, we lose no money. This allows the player to experiment with weaponry and whether or not it’s better to buy a new weapon or upgrade an existing one. Once you get the better ship in the second level, you’re able to have three “front” weapons, one “bomb” weapon, one “missile” weapon, and one “rear” weapon. Jets’n’Guns is all about playing your cards right, and if you do so well enough, you’ll get through the game in good enough time and relative ease (unless you increase the difficulty).

When you actually play the game, you’re able to use your mouse or keyboard to control your jet. Until you upgrade your engine and wings, it will be much wiser to use the keyboard, as it will respond to your commands much better. The primary shooting button is the space bar, and will shoot all of your weapons except the bombs. Pressing the B key will unleash the weapon you have in your bombs slot to wreak havoc on those bastard pirates. The only thing that is confusing about these basic controls is that there is no tutorial of any kind to help you out with actually figuring out the basic controls. Later on, other keys are used (such as Shift, Z, and X) to utilize your other abilities.

Innovations that can be seen in this game come in a few ways.These are mostly put in affect when you buy special abilities. Purchasing an item called the “Rotary Cage” allows players to change the angle of your front weapons to shoot in about five different angles. This is very useful when enemies are at an angle and you otherwise can’t shoot at them. Another innovation comes with something called “RemCon.” During the game you can take control of special objects (like gates and trucks) and work them to your advantage. Most of the time, they’re done automatically, and you don’t have to do anything physically yourself except for being able to send your signal long enough to the particular object so you can hack into it and take control of it.

Graphics are nothing short of a spectacular light show you can enjoyably indulge yourself in. This game features some very polished off 3D animations, diverse weaponry, and hundreds of explosions every minute of play-time. Nothing in the game graphic-wise needs to be polished any more than it already is, as it shows that a lot of effort and creativity went into the process of making it. Especially for an independent company with a small budget, the graphics really impressed me. Even though they aren’t the absolute best in PC gaming nowadays, by any means, the graphics and enemy designs (which the game boasts to have more than 200 enemies) make this for one hell of an experience.

As if great gameplay, great graphics, and new innovations weren’t enough, a heavy metal band named Machinae Supremacy conducted the whole soundtrack. This makes for some really entertaining killing music as you mercilessly destroy hundreds of thousands of Pirates flying out of their spaceships after you blow it up, only to shoot them with your huge guns and have their blood and guts spray out across the screen. Each of the 21 levels have their own song, making for absolutely no redundancy in music choice, except when it came to the title screen, setup screen, and the game over screen. One mission that you invade a Pirate concert to kick some ass for no better reason other than because they were Pirates, the background music had vocals in it. It made it seem like you were at an actual concert.

The few faults this game actually has come with its story. The story itself is unimportant, as you could skip through it without any repercussions. Even though it was fleetingly interesting, it could have been better. Before each mission, you got a new set of “contacts” from which could be the annoying daughter of Von Hamburger, a six-eyed alien, or your general that seems to like to send you on solo missions all the time. If you ask me, there is no “force” of any type that the general has command over. You also get “bulletins” about convicts that can be turned in for a bounty. Another problem with the story came with the actual wording. Too often did I see simple words misspelled or grammar errors that could have been picked out by a fifth grader. However, where it loses ground in story definitely makes up for in random humor. I don’t know how they did it, but they made this game have at least one ridiculous joke per level, and weapon pictures as if they were advertisements in a magazine. You can get “25% off” on bombs or get a “free popular game” when you bought a plasma weapon. Through one of the levels I even saw a disk floating in the middle of ceiling, and next to it says “Universe Boot Up Disk – Use If Universe Needs to Be Rebooted” and integrated in the description, there was a Microsoft joke. It’s not that hard to find the random jokes, but they are easy to overlook. Even though the game is supposed to have at least some sort of seriousness to it, the random jokes don’t detract from this, as you will still feel inclined to kill as many stupid Pirates as you can. When you beat the game, you float through an asteroid field, similar to the ending of “The Neverending Story.” It’s hilarious, because you see the Crystal Palace floating in the background, and then you see the dog creature guy (his name escapes me at this moment) flying across the bottom of the screen with Bastian on his back.

Even though Jets’n’Guns is another game in a seemingly worn-out genre, it definitely breathes new life into side-scrolling-space-ship-shooting-an-endless-amount-of-oncoming-enemies type of games. The game becomes fairly addicting, as I have spent the past few days playing this until two o’clock in the morning because it’s that fun. When it comes to price I was actually surprised that it was only $19.95 (for download only) or $24.95 if you bought the CD to get shipped to your house (including download). I can think of equally priced games that are nowhere near as amazing as Jets’n’Guns, which is truly an enthralling experience.

Game Reviews, Games

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (PC) Review

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Developer: BioWare Corp. / Publisher: LucasArts || Overall: 9.3/10

In recent years, Bioware has come to be a very well known company throughout the gaming industry, producing such great games as the Neverwinter Nights, Baldur’s Gate, as well as MDK2. With the release of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for the Xbox, Bioware had achieved even more fame, through its refreshingly new RPG taking place in the Star Wars universe well before the first episode in the Star Wars movie saga. When Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic finally was released on the PC, people without an Xbox (and even some with) got to experience the game in a whole new way.

From a gaming standpoint, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic offered more than just the expansive interaction in an older version of the Star Wars universe, but also gave the freedom of choosing whether or not you became good, evil, a woman, a man, a soldier, a scoundrel, and how many of these attributes you choose in building your character as. Not much unlike The Sims, you can also choose your character’s face, which have all different kinds of skin colors. Through the course of the game, what your characters have equipped will also reflect on their characters, adding another layer of customization to your character.

The graphics in the game are nothing very special in the broad spectrum of gaming nowadays; however, the excellent portrayal of how the different races in the Star Wars universe, the planets you travel to, and the immense amount of action happening at the same time, without lag, definitely makes an impact on the senses. When playing the game, you feel as if you are actually living in the Star Wars universe, and for some people, nothing could ever be better than just that. From Tusken Raiders to the Rancor, to evil smugglers always looking out for that extra Credit, your time spent in the time of the Old Republic will be a fantastic one, full of mystery, wonder, and enough things to do to make you stay for a very long time.

When you start a new game, you are able to chose one of three different kinds of initial profiles for your character, whether it be the male or female version. Throughout the whole game, you are able to customize your characters (skills-and-abilities-wise), or go along with what the game thinks you should devote all your enhancement points for. If you take your character’s skills and abilities growth into full control, you can pick from a wide spectrum of many abilities, and allocate the points to about eight different areas.

When you start out the game, you start out alone in your barracks, sleeping, when all of a sudden the ship you’re on gets attacked by the Sith. At this time, your shift-mate Trask, comes in and tells you the ship is being attacked. With a few background hints to the story, and directions on how to function in the game, you’re off and ready to battle. The whole first mission you’re on is basically a pre-training mission. Your actual training begins when you escape from the ship, and land on one of the most important planets in the galaxy, Taris. The whole time you’re on Taris, you’re looking for Bastila (the Jedi who was the commanding officer on the mission you were on), and trying to figure out a way to get off the socially horrible planet of Taris.

So, you may be asking “when do you actually BECOME a Jedi?” Well, after you get off of Taris, you’ll become a Jedi after the famous “Jedi training.” It’s a piece of cake on your part, as long as you have a piece of paper and something to write with, but it sure does look like your character uses a lot of his/her own energy to succeed at becoming a Jedi.

As you play more of the game, the story delivers its vast complexity very slowly, allowing you to immerse into one detail at a time. The main story behind the game, is that two former Jedi, Malak and Revan (Malak being the master, and Revan being the student), turn to the dark side when they find an artifact, disappear for many years, then come back with a huge amount of ships and an army bigger than the loosely-nit Republic army. The Jedi Order helps the Republic by trying to capture Malak and Revan, and that’s where Bastila defines her importance in the story. Bastila was the one that actually had Malak in a tight position and was about to defeat him, when Revan backstabbed Malak and killed him, to gain control of the entire Sith fleet and army. Through the whole game, you will do everything in your power to help Bastila defeat Revan and the evil Sith, or the exact opposite, depending on how you chose the events through the game.

“Enough about the story; how’s the game play?” As some of you may or may not know, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was first released on the Xbox. The transition from controller to keyboard/mouse control has been a very smooth one, as Knights of the Old Republic plays just like it was made for the PC, which it is. Amongst a few of the improvements over the Xbox version, many of the bugs had been kinked out, as well as a different interface for basic controls (such as getting items). When it comes to actual battles, the basics are still the same. When enemies are encountered, you’re able to plan out your characters’ actions, so they can take those actions in real-time fighting. Even though you’re not actively engaged in the battles (like an action/adventure), you’re still very much apart of the battle, directing what your characters should do, may it be a life or death decision. This is where Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic veers off from the normal turn-based RPG. This non-turn based engagement system eliminates the need for random battles, as groups of enemies wait in rooms or travel around the map waiting for you.

If item-collecting is your thing, rest-assured, there are many items to be collected in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. There are tons of different things to equip your characters with for each part of their body (including inside their skull), as well as many different types of medical items, weapons, and items to advance the story. The sheer wealth of things you can collect will make you cry when trying to find a certain item you want, or when you’re curious to know what you lost or gained (which happens quite frequently without knowing what is exchanged).

Unlike most games before the release of Knights of the Old Republic, the choices you make at every turn will directly or indirectly influence the development of the story of your character. Whether you chose to go the dark route or stay on the side of light is the ultimate test in this game. If you can make the right decisions and follow the Jedi code, it will be generally easy to stay on the light side. If you chose to be a complete ass, just to see what the reactions of everyone has been programmed with will be when you stab them in the backs. It may be tricky to act like you’re on their side when you’re really not.

As with any RPG, you get an assortment of colorful characters to become your allies in this crazy game. From Jedis to droids to mercenaries, the story will yet again be influenced by whom you keep yourself in the company with. They may make an “on-the-edge” situation into peace or an all-out-battle. If you keep a Jedi in your party, sometimes they will step in and “persuade” a character you’re talking to, into doing what you want them to do. It may seem to you that you would like to have everybody you’ve acquired to travel around with you at all times, but you’re only allowed to have two other allies with you, so depending on the situation you are about to face, you will have to take the allies that will be of more use to you.

And if this wasn’t enough, there are several mini-games and mini-quests that break up the straightforwardness of the main story. An additional “trading” world had been added in the PC version from the Xbox version. Here, you’re able to buy and trade for items that are very rare. If you’re able to take advantage of these items, they will help you immensely in the challenges you face ahead.

The amazingly immersive adventure you are taken through is one that will make you look at the Star Wars videogame series in a new light. If you think of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic as the history behind the Star Wars movies, you will be able to make many connections and think up many possible theories about the story as a whole. And as if this wasn’t enough, there is a history to the history of the Star Wars series. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is simply the best Star Wars game to ever be made, and even after all I have told you, there is still so much to find and discover for yourself.

Game Reviews, Games

Halo: Combat Evolved (PC) Review

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Developer: Bungie Games / Publisher: Microsoft Games Studio || Overall: 9.1/10

As an exclusive to the Xbox for about two years, Halo has found its way to the PC, and boy does it absolutely rule. Everything has made the transition from the Xbox title seamlessly, if not, better. With the PC version, there came the much wanted, needed, and not included in Halo for the Xbox…online multiplayer.

The online multiplayer Halo (PC) offers all the modes of regular multiplayer with the exception of the “Co-operative” mode for the campaign. If that’s what you love about Halo, then keep playing it on the XBOX, because, in all honesty, Co-Operative mode kind of sucks if you’re not in the same room with the person you’re playing with. There wouldn’t even be that much Co-Operativeness with someone you’re playing with online anyhow.

However, if you’ve never played Halo for the Xbox, and are very interested in buying it for the PC, you’ll probably not even understand too much of what I was talking about. Halo is a first person shooter. Within this game, you play the role of the character only referred to as the Master Chief. The Master Chief is the super elite commando guy that they keep in some freezer when they don’t need him. He’s probably best described as a cyborg. And he’s green.

So what do you do in Halo? Well, other than dying a million times by sniper shots from other people in multiplayer and trying to shoot back before you die, you kill aliens. So, what’s the big deal, you may ask? You can do that with pretty much any other science fiction first person shooting game can’t you? Well, the features that set Halo far apart from any of its counterparts are: advanced artificial intelligence, vehicles, and levels that usually have big mazes ending with equally-sized battles. Everything rolled into one makes for a very challenging, and fun, game.

The story in the single player campaign revolves mainly around the war between humans, the Covenant, a big object floating in space (aptly named Halo, where most of the game takes place), and a mysterious species called the Flood. Insanity and many many dead aliens ensue in this all-around amazing experience.

Graphics:
The graphics in Halo are going to push your computer’s hardware to the limit. Even if you put everything on the worst settings, you’d be lucky (unless you have a computer good enough for Halo to run well, by all means go crazy…) if it doesn’t lag during the really high action parts. The graphics in Halo look so good, it makes me want to cry. From the Xbox version, they’ve been touched up and smoothed out. However, since Halo is fairly aged, it does not look as good as Doom 3, and will have almost no comparison to its successor, Halo 2, in terms of graphics.

All the environments from single-player maps to multiplayer maps are beautiful. The designs of all the different locations you visit on Halo are very elaborate, and look very realistic (had those places actually existed). The weapons and explosions also look spectacular. The way they’re designed and animated makes it enjoyable to fill an alien full of lead or knock one out with the butt of your assault rifle.

Sound:
Everything sounds the same as the Xbox version. The dialogue scenes have been improved a little, because in the Xbox version, there were parts of the dialogue that was hard to hear, not being able to understand what they were saying. For the most part, this has been fixed. There are a lot of different sounds that help create the atmosphere of Halo. From machine guns and plasma guns to marines shouting in pain as they fly into the air, you’re going to feel almost overwhelmed trying to keep up with what’s going on.

Gameplay:
The game actually plays just like a normal first-person shooter game. There’s little that is actually different in terms of control. However, there are grenades, which add extra depth to the strategy you may use in the game. Two types of grenades are available for use – the normal “fragmentation” grenades, and the notoriously shiny blue “sticky” plasma grenades. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and can help during some very tight situations.

The single-player game takes a lot of different skills to get through successfully. During the first part of the game, you don’t usually come in and start blasting everything you see. You have to take thought in your actions, and remember where you’ve been, as well as try to figure out puzzles that are presented to you throughout the game. This changes around the half-way point of the game, however. When that comes around, there’s more action and fighting rather than trying to figure out puzzles along the way from Point A to Point B. The single player mode is very story driven, and as major events happen, it adds more to the “mystery” that is the structure called Halo.

The huge maps in the single player mode also provide for some very long levels, so you’re going to have to conserve your ammo, and try to get the least amount of hits as you can, as you don’t know when the next time you’ll be able to get more ammo or health packs to recover health. You’ll experience many varying terrains, such as mountains, islands, huge underground complexes, and snowed-in valleys. Every one of the different kinds of terrains is very detailed, such as the mountain levels, which are full of trees, rivers, and large boulders. Sometimes a level may start out as a mountain level, but feed into a large underground complex full of tunnels and caverns underneath the ground.

Other than Halo’s massive single player campaign, a very important part of the game is its multiplayer, more specifically, online multiplayer. There are many different types of multiplayer games you can play. Among the many game modes are:

Slayer – Normal multiplayer, in which you kill other players in a free-for-all.
Capture the Flag – Team based; you try to get the other teams flag and bring it back to your own base.
Race – Race around the multiplayer map…hooray…

An addition to Halo for the PC from the Xbox version is the Warthog with a Rocket Launcher on it. In the original, there was only a machine gun-mounted Warthog. Other vehicles making their comeback are the Scorpion Tank, the Ghost, and the now-playable Banshee.

Overall:
If you’ve played Halo for the Xbox, or any other FPS game, you’ll feel right at home with the PC Halo. Halo is an all around great game, and it’s all that Halo for the Xbox is and more, save the co-op mode. But if you’re one of those people who are going to complain about it, stay with your Xbox version; I don’t want to hear your complaining during a Slayer game. Otherwise, the online multiplayer/the fact that you don’t have an Xbox is really what you’re going to go for when you get Halo for the PC.

Games, Game Reviews

Void War (PC) Review

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Developer/Publisher: Rampant Games || Overall: 3.0/10

Nothing short of unoriginal, Void War is a space shooter in which you command a ship to go around and shoot things, and marvel at how hard it is to control a ship in a gravity barrier. This game sucks, unconditionally. How about we start with the basics?

Controlling your ship seems to be easy enough. You control your ship in one of three ways: keyboard, mouse, or joystick. Since I don’t have a joystick, I had to use the mouse controls. Now, the way you control your ship isn’t bad, it’s just how it is executed. When you click the left mouse button, you shoot some lasers, and when you right-click, you use your boosters to go fast. When you let those bad boys go, there’s a stream of flame behind you, and you go super fast through space!!!! This is all fine and dandy until you try and get one of those great power ups like the “hardened defense” or the “stealth generator” or the “missiles.” It is literally impossible to not get frustrated trying to get to a certain spot to get one of these power-ups. Even though you can generally get to the place you want to go with the controls, the accuracy in which you’d like to have to get one of these power-ups (which are really small, and the game should actually give them to you if you were in the general area of the power-up) is abysmal. The power-ups aren’t very important, but it’ll make the game a lot easier, especially with the missiles, because I suck at using the lasers to kill the other ships.

When you get one of these power-ups, like a missile, you’re able to use them right away. Its usually better to get one of the missiles, because then you’re able to shoot them at a ship that you’re trying to kill. And, of course, this isn’t too easy either. First of all the AI can control their ships better than you can, without a doubt. So they’re dodging and flying around asteroids and flying around a huge space station that just appears out of nowhere, so you can barely even shoot them with your lasers even if you had a clear shot. That’s why I use missiles and blow them away, but the missiles suck because they don’t even damage them past their shields, so then you’re outta luck again. And what’s even better is that your enemies are also going for the power-ups, so they can become even more annoying.

When you use your boosters or use your lasers, you also use energy for that particular ability. For example, when you use your lasers, you can only shoot so many before it gets down to zero and you can’t shoot anymore. The energy recovers fairly quickly, but when you’re in a dogfight, or have the enemy’s ship flying around in a somersault around you, it’s not fast enough. The same general thing happens to your shield, and as you get hit, your shields deplete, but then recover when you don’t use any lasers or rockets.

The developer tries to toss in a little bit of strategy by being able to “order” your energies in a fashion that whatever is the first one is the one that is most supplied with energy, making it either stronger, recover faster, or something like that. I’m not too sure what it ACTUALLY does, as it really doesn’t make too much of a difference that I can see, except that whatever is in the first position will (or implies that it will) have better improvements than the others. At random times your boosters or lasers may stop recovering altogether, so you have to put either one of them in the first spot to start recovering again. I also see that at random times the energy stops depleting from lasers/boosters even though you’re using them. This may or may not be a glitch in the game; I just don’t know.

Nothing about this game makes me more disappointed than the pathetic excuse for an unmotivated story they use for their campaign/single player mode. This is the story in a nutshell for the first four levels:

Level 1:
Lance: Look at me, I’m just out in the middle of space, near some planet in some galaxy somewhere in the universe. Hey what happened to my girlfriend? I better get some missiles, knowing the kind of trouble SHE gets in!!! (laughter from the peanut gallery) There’re always missiles cached near asteroids, so I’m going to go look for them. I better watch out for the gravity barriers though!!!!

Level 2:
(a drone ship comes out of freakin nowhere)

Lance: Oh look at that, there’s a drone ship that they used during the big nameless war we had a few years ago. They used to be used as decoys, and they did a pretty good job of it. I think I’ll shoot it down, ‘cause I need some target practice, even though I was supposed to use my missiles to save my girlfriend.

Level 3:
Lance: I’ve got enough missiles hooray, now I’m going to go find my girlfriend. Hey buddy, have you seen my girlfriend, her name is Bimbo Whatserface.

Pirate Guy: Bimbo Whatserface? You mean the FAMOUS space heroine? You know her?

Lance: Yeah, you could say that.

Pirate Guy: No I haven’t seen her. I’ve just been doing random acts of piracy over here!

Lance: Oh…uh…good luck with that…

Pirate Guy: You think you’re gonna get off that easy? I’m not stupid! YOU’RE MY NEXT VICTIM!!!

Lance: I was kind of hoping that you were…!

Level 4:
No story scene, you just all of a sudden start fighting another ship that comes outta nowhere, and a big space station suddenly appears.

And then later on in the story, you find some guy that is working for a corporation spread out among galaxies. The guy tells you stupid crap about the corporation you don’t need to know, says an area is off-limits, but the main character says “screw this, I’m breaking through.”

Now you may find this story kind of farfetched, but this isn’t far from the truth. I was exaggerating in some places, but the basic premise really is in the game. There is NO character development, NO reason why people just all of a sudden attack you, except for the fact that they’re retarded. There is also some crappy artwork for still images to go with your character text displays.

Even though this game sucks horribly, there are some okay aspects to it. First of all, is the music. The music is cool, because it sounds like metal opera or metal ballad songs. There are only a couple of songs though, so they get played over and over and over. Then there’s the graphics. The graphics are alright, but they don’t look terrible either. It’s just that this game is not very good. They just drop you in the middle of space, and hope you have fun killing random AI-driven enemies while rocking out to metal opera. There is a multiplayer mode, but in all seriousness WHO are you going to find to play with? Not me, that’s for sure.

And just in case you didn’t know what game you were playing, the developers graciously put a big “Void War” logo at the top right of your screen so you can look at it at all times.