Galactic Assault: Prisoner of Power

Although all of your initial impressions about Galactic Assault: Prisoner of Power lead you to believe that it's yet another cut-rate effort slapped together in a cold-water flat in a former Warsaw Pact nation, this is not the case. For starters, developer Wargaming.net is based in Louisiana. Second, this is one playable turn-based strategy game. Yes, it's based on a Russian sci-fi novel that you've never heard of. Yes, the developer is about as anonymous as a crowd on a subway platform to anyone who hasn't played its Massive Assault series. But the game itself is more polished than you would expect. It offers a great interface and enticing tactical engagements, despite miscues such as incoherent storytelling and missions that are a little too carefully constructed.

For a game based on a novel, you would think that Galactic Assault would at least have a strong story going for it. On the contrary, the plot of the campaign is so poorly told that even an English speaker could probably make more sense out of the original, untranslated book. Either some people at Wargaming.net need to brush up on their Russian, or authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky need to work on their storytelling skills. It's pretty hard to even figure out what's going on here because the mission briefings make nothing clear. You apparently lead Maxim Kammerer of the Land of Unknown Fathers in a war for the alien planet of Saraksh against Khontie, Insular Empire, and Southern Barbarian factions. But beyond those basics, your guesses are as good as ours. You'd be better off making up a story like you were a five-year-old playing with toy soldiers than trying to comprehend the seemingly random cutscene voice-overs.

Thankfully, the missions themselves are smartly structured. Even though you might never know the reasons why you're fighting a war, at least you always know what you're supposed to be doing in the individual battles. Assignments are actually so masterfully laid out that even strategy-game beginners will have no problems grasping the basic concepts of warfare on Saraksh. After a brief tutorial mission to acquaint you with the interface, an advisor walks Maxim and his troops through the initial missions against the Khontie. This is a teensy bit tedious, given that you feel as if you're painting by numbers at times. Yet this measured approach does a great job of introducing the strengths of armored units as opposed to infantry, as well as how to use artillery to beef up defenses, the best way to dig in ground troops, and so on. It even covers elementary battle tactics such as flanking dug-in enemy positions.

All of these tips get you thinking strategically from the very beginning, so you won't waste any time on frontal assaults or stupid tank rushes. This is a very good thing, in that the structure of the game makes it look more like a simplistic real-time strategy game than the turn-based wargame that it actually is. The fairly generic army-man units in three of the four factions don't do much to help this visual distinction; only the Southern Barbarians sort of stand out, with more rough-and-ready equipment and monstrous ghouls standing in for shock troops. Turns are divided into separate sections for movement, combat, and reinforcement. Circular targets spell out which spots units can go to during the movement phase of each turn. Units can't be stacked, so they must be laid out in easy-to-spot formations when attacking or defending. Warnings let you know if you're about to end a turn with a unit still being able to move or fire. Unit strength and morale is depicted with a bar and a light, respectively, both of which go from green to yellow to red. Overall, this is one of the most helpful strategy interfaces to come along in some time. Many little touches here should be emulated by rival developers.

Everything else is based on a traditional real-time format, with the only difference being that you move units in turns, of course. Money earned for completing objectives and ka-booming the enemy is used to augment preexisting bases with depots that construct all manner of military hardware, from infantry grunts, to futuristic choppers, to engineering corps who can lay down bridges. However, production is relatively sedate. Instead of rolling hordes of troops and tanks off of production lines, fairly tight monetary limits force you to be cautious about what you're sending into the field. The pace of combat is also fairly measured. It can take a number of turns just to take out an infantry company, so there are no battles of attrition here. Yet at the same time, battles don't drag. For want of a better description, they feel right, with units that take appropriate amounts of damage before going down. Missions can stretch to an hour or so, although they generally move along quite quickly, which makes this one of the zippiest turn-based games you'll ever play.

That said, there are a few flies in the ointment. Enemy artificial intelligence is relentless on the attack, although it seems to hit you with a pretty blunt frontal assault much of the time instead of carefully managing its units. Missions are overly structured at times. This is pretty refreshing in the scenario and deathmatch solo modes of play, given that the detailed objectives provide both with a sense of purpose often missing from the cheapie sandbox styles that mark skirmish play in other strategy games. But such a design is also limiting, in that missions can become awfully linear. The only way to break away from this is to go multiplayer, and all it offers is one-on-one deathmatching (not that there ever seems to be anybody on the servers, anyhow). Bugs afflict some of the solo deathmatch maps, as well. On a regular basis, games will end suddenly after just a single turn. You get an error message that the game seems to be broken, and a bizarre prompt to fix it, followed by a quick exit to the main menu.

The presentation values raise further gripes. Although the audio effects are acceptable during battles, and the voice acting is actually pretty good for your standard wargame, the visuals are so grainy and dark that it's hard to tell one unit from another when zoomed out even a touch. The time of day changes as well, which makes this problem even worse when the sun goes down. At night, it's awfully tough to see much of anything without scrolling right down to field level.

Even with its flaws, Galactic Assault's great interface and emphasis on battlefield tactics make it worth a look. It could use some help when it comes to storytelling and visual design, but those missteps are largely balanced out by what this game does right.

By Brett Todd, GameSpot

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts

When Company of Heroes shipped last year, it proved that there's plenty of life in the World War II real-time strategy genre if companies take risks and innovate. THQ and Relic's superb real-time strategy game did that by blending in so many cutting-edge elements that it made the battlefield come alive like rarely before. Thanks to impressive artificial intelligence that made soldiers move and act like the real thing, as well as the tactical implications of a spectacular and fully destructible battlefield, Company of Heroes was a game that rewarded smart and quick thinking. With an excellent single-player campaign and thrilling multiplayer gameplay, it was also named GameSpot's 2007 PC Game of the Year. Now, just slightly a year after it was released, THQ and Relic have released Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, a fairly straightforward and satisfying follow-up that delivers more content for would-be Pattons to enjoy.

Opposing Fronts is more of a pseudosequel than an expansion pack. You don't need the original Company of Heroes to play it, though if you do you'll be able to select from the US Army and regular German Army factions from that game in skirmish matches. Otherwise, you'll be restricted to the two new factions introduced in Opposing Fronts: the British Army and the German Panzer Elite. These factions both get their own campaign that, when combined, make for a longer single-player experience than Company of Heroes. Interestingly, the campaigns are staggered so that they're in nonlinear order. You'll begin with the story of two German brothers battling against the daring airborne assault of Operation Market Garden, and in the following campaign you'll leap further back into the past to participate in the British Army's lengthy and bloody assault on the French city of Caen.

The heart of the expansion can be found in the new factions. Both play quite differently from the US and German factions in the first game, and though you needn't have played Company of Heroes to dive into Opposing Fronts, it's hard not to shake the feeling that the British and Panzer Elite are designed for veteran players. That's because their mobile nature makes them a bit more of a handful to control than the prior factions. To clarify, the Panzer Elite is built around the idea of hard-hitting and fast-moving combat groups that can race around the battlefield, either to counter what the enemy is doing or to exploit an opening. To that extent, the Panzer Elite doesn't so much lock down territory as it bulldozes its way across the map. Thankfully, Panzer Elite infantry can repair vehicles during slight pauses, but you won't have a lot of time to hunker down before another situation needs putting out.

At first glance, the British Army seems to be built similarly around the idea of mobility and defenses, given that it has mobile headquarters units that can relocate around the map. However, the British also excel at building things: devastating howitzer emplacements, mortar pits, slit trenches, and more. As one might expect, the campaign missions highlight each faction's abilities quite nicely. In the brutal house-to-house fighting of Caen, the British can call in the dreaded "creeping barrage" that shatters enemy lines. Likewise, the Panzer Elite can punch through Allied defenses and raid around their rears to capture or destroy landing points for airborne forces.

Opposing Fronts doesn't add any significant new gameplay features to Company of Heroes. The most noteworthy new additions come courtesy of the new faction doctrines, such as scorched-earth tactics for the Axis. These upgrades let you booby-trap buildings so that enemy infantry who enter them are in for a big surprise, and also let you blow up strategic objective points to deny them to the enemy. Both factions have three different upgrade paths to choose from, and these can help tailor the game to your style or tactical situation.

Multiplayer was a key part of Company of Heroes' success. The destructible battlefields and finely balanced gameplay can make for countless nail-biting moments online. Finding battles was also easy, thanks to the top-notch server browser. Not surprisingly, Opposing Fronts doesn't tinker with what's not obviously broken. The only caveat is that it's a bit difficult to find a game online around launch, so hopefully the community will pick up. If you can't find a match, there's also skirmish support with a wide range of AI opponents. If you want to learn the basics, you can lower the difficulty to pushover status. On the other hand, if you want to test your skills against ruthless and relentless opponents, then just ramp up the difficulty. As before, there are two game modes. There's annihilation, which is basically a standard deathmatch that can be played from one-on-one up to three-on-three, as well as victory-point control mode, which is a great alternative to annihilation. That's because victory-point control forces you to battle for three control points on the map. If you let the enemy hold on to them for too long, you'll lose, so there's a constant level of tension throughout most of the game.

The presentation and production values are excellent, and it never gets old watching buildings collapse or vehicles explode in huge fireballs. Artillery actually carves out craters that infantry can use for cover. If the enemy has a defensive chokepoint, then you can use your tanks or artillery to blow open another path. Opposing Fronts does add weather effects, such as a heavy rain that drenches the battlefield, but for the most part the visuals are otherwise indistinguishable from last year's game. Even with DirectX 10 support, which was added to Company of Heroes via a patch, it's hard to see any huge improvements. Still, the graphics remain impressive and still feel fresh. The audio is also excellent. Both campaigns have their own unique music, and the British campaign in particular is inspiring. Furthermore, the sounds of battle are some of the best around. If there are explosions onscreen, you hear them full-on; if you move the camera away from the explosions, they become muted and distant.

Opposing Fronts doesn't revolutionize the genre like its predecessor did, but at the same time, no one has really caught up with Company of Heroes yet, either. Sure, games such as Supreme Commander push the science-fiction RTS genre in cool new directions, but the World War II RTS genre has yet to learn the lessons of Company of Heroes. With Opposing Fronts, THQ and Relic keep a great thing going.

By Jason Ocampo, GameSpot