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.