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| The Unholy War | |
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Anyone who has ever enjoyed a game of chess or wanted to play that holographic chess game with Chewbacca and R2D2 in Star Wars will enjoy The Unholy War. Just don't pull anyone's arms out of their sockets if they should beat you. |
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Do you remember the holographic chess game that Chewbacca and R2D2 play on board the Millennium Falcon? I have been waiting ever since for a game like The Unholy War. There has been Battle Chess and Final Fantasy Tactics. There are computerized war games. There is Real Time Strategy but never a game that truly combined deep, strategic, turn based movement with arcade combat. The Unholy War manages to so, in a way that is so much more than Tekken on a chess board.
Flesh Vs Metal The Unholy War puts you in the middle of a war for planetary control. The Arcane races of the planet Xsarra are powerful and combatant. For the most part however, due to mutual respect, they have lived for thousands of years in peace. An invasion force is about to shatter that peace. The Teknos are cybernetic conquerors who seek the resources of Xsarra for their own. Slaughtering the bio-trash Arcane races will be a pleasure for the Teknos who have spoiled many planets in their past. The Teknos are marvels of mech-like cybernetic weaponry. As a force, they are the most advanced battle group in the galaxy. Despite their thousands of years of peace, the Arcane races of Xsarra have not forgotten how to wage war. They have allied themselves against the Teknos invaders and The Unholy War for dominance of Xsarra has begun. The Unholy War has two modes. There is Mayhem mode where players can simply battle it out arcade style and Strategy, which combines the arcade action of Mayhem mode and the strategy of chess. Mayhem In Mayhem, each player chooses a team, Arcane, Teknos or all of the above. The game can also be played single-player against Easy, Normal or Hard AI. There is a big jump between the various skill levels and while Normal AI will defeat new comers and give a good fight to those who have played enough to recognize the various units, Hard AI will remain a challenge to even the best players. Once your teams are selected, you can choose a zone to battle in, set the computer to cycle through the 14 zones or just choose randomly. The different zones alter strategy and the characters you will want to choose. Some of the zones are wide open and favour the quick moving, and units with homing weapons. Other zones are enclosed and favour units that hit hard and set traps. There are locked battle zones, which will be unlocked as you win single player games. The way that Mayhem mode works is that each player chooses a unit to battle. The winner stays and the looser chooses a new unit. Any damage accrued by the winner remains for the next battle. When all of one player's units have been eliminated, the other has won. Crystal Dynamics has effectively made the units very different, and it's great. Each has their strengths and their weaknesses. If your opponent defeated you by using the Jaeger unit which is big, slow and hits hard, then you might choose the Ecton (which sets traps) and lure your opponent into a trap and pound him down. Trouble is, your opponent will next, select a unit that can fly and your pitiful trap laying Ecton will stand no chance. On and on it goes. As a player grows accustomed to the units and their Mayhem battle skills improve, the player will win more of the battles between closely matched units, but it will always be extremely difficult to win with an unsuitable and outmatched unit. Mayhem skill can make up for some strategic weakness but good strategy can also cancel out battleground weakness. Each unit has three different attacks, typically a long range, short range and special attack. Mayhem combat is not as deep as a pure arcade fight game like Tekken 3, but it is fast paced and fun. There is a rich variety of characters and of their attacks. Some have long range homing attacks. Some units are very fast and difficult to hit. Some can fly. To be successful at The Unholy War, a player must learn the strengths and weaknesses of each of the units. Besides the difference in types of attack, there is also a wide variance in Health and Energy. Some of the units are able to withstand a ton of damage while others can only survive a couple of hits. Each unit also has an Energy bar, which recharges at different rates. Every attack uses a certain amount of Energy. As a general rule, special attacks use more energy than long range attacks, which, in turn, use more energy than short range attacks. If a unit runs out of Energy then it must wait and recharge before any more attacks can be made. During the course of a combat, various power ups will appear on the map. These power ups include Invincibility, Health recharges and extra Speed. Getting to a power-up before the enemy can turn the course of a battle. It can also cost you some serious damage if your opponent sees you running for it and can hit you with the right attack. Camera and Graphics Mayhem combat is viewed through a roving, computer controlled camera. The camera pans and swivels to follow the action and keep both combatants on screen, usually from a 3/4 above perspective. While players have no control over the camera, the camera framing is very good and it is extremely rare that the camera is even noticeable. Occasionally, it will arrive that a player is prevented for a split second from moving to a far corner of the map because that corner is not on screen. Graphically, The Unholy War is unremarkable. The characters are animated and rendered adequately, as are the backgrounds and maps. In combat, fires and explosions act as light-sources which is a nice touch. Other than that, nothing is remarkable either positively or negatively. Many of the characters themselves are very much comic book inspired. X-Men fans will recognize the Fire Witch and Dark Angel. Spawn fans will recognize the Violator inspired Prana Devils. Strategy In Strategy mode, each player usually begins with a base and a number of units. The strategic maps are circular and laid out in a hexagonal grid. Most maps have some strategic hexes, which contain AUR resources. AUR can be used to purchase new units at an intact base or to use the special Strategy Skills of the various units. Each turn, 10 units of AUR are automatically granted with extra being rewarded if the player has a unit on one of the strategic AUR rich hexes. Further complicating strategy is the fact that some units are better at mining AUR than others. The strategic maps also have barriers such as cliffs and water which only flying units can cross. The object of the game is to completely eliminate the opposing army. Movement is turn based. During each player's turn, that player may move up to three units or use up to three Strategy Skills. Again, some units can move farther than others. Anytime a unit is moved adjacent to an enemy, the active player has the option of attacking. Combat is resolved Mayhem style. Anytime an enemy unit enters a player's base, the base is destroyed. Once the base is destroyed, the player can no longer purchase new units. Units can also be guarded. Anytime a unit is attacked and defeated, all adjacent units have the option of counter attacking. Each hex on the map has an assigned battle zone and choosing the best type of zone to set your units on adds even more depth to the strategy of The Unholy War. Each of the units also has a Strategy Skill that can be used. Some of the units can place a barrier on the map, which other units can not cross. Some of the units can attack and damage enemy units from afar. Others can heal. Other units can teleport, and so on. Use of Strategy Skills, like purchasing new units costs AUR and as a result, strategic battles focus around control of the AUR rich hexes and destroying the enemy base. A large part of the strategy is in arranging that units only battle enemies which are vulnerable to them and not those which are difficult for them to defeat. The Unholy War really is a deep and difficult strategy game, which is very close to being a true classic. There are only a couple of minor errors that prevent this game from reaching that status. Unholy The first error in this game is the story. Single player strategy games play through a very dull and anti-climactic story of 12 battles. The story is bad and adds nothing to the game. It feels very much tacked on at the end of the game and detracts from the experience of playing The Unholy War. Coupled with the poor story is Crystal Dynamics' decision to create new and unrecognizable character types. Unfortunately, so many of them are obviously borrowed from the comics that they might as well have licensed the Marvel Universe and done a super hero vs. super villain game. By choosing character types with which players are not familiar, Crystal Dynamics has also greatly increased the learning curve. It takes a long time to be able to recognize by sight the various characters and their strengths and weaknesses. Had more familiar fantasy, comic or military characters been used, the learning curve would have been much easier and the game would be more accessible. As it stands, if someone who has played The Unholy War wishes to share the game with an uninitiated friend then the newbie must be given significant time to simply play Mayhem mode alone. It is also impossible to play Arcane vs. Arcane or Teknos vs. Teknos in Strategy battles and the battles are fixed. A simple battle editor would have been an easy and valuable addition to The Unholy War. Two-player action is great. Why, oh why not take it to four-player? Again, this would have been a simple addition. There are gaps in the documentation. It is not documented, for example, how much AUR each of the different character types can mine in a turn nor how much AUR their Strategy Skills cost. Although the Mayhem battle system works very well and is fun, there are a couple of cases where the unit types are so different that combats can degenerate to a sort of stand off where nothing gets done. Let's say that one player is using a unit which can fly but that can only recharge Energy when landed. The enemy has no effective way of attacking airborne units but if the player lands to recharge the enemy will an overwhelming advantage. What can happen is that the flying unit circles and circles and the ground unit chases and curses while nothing gets done. This is minor and happens very seldom but when it does, someone just has to step up, be a man and fight. Lastly, one of the Teknos units, the Razorfane is decidedly superior to all other units. By playing the Teknos side, it is easy to use only this well-rounded unit, which ultimately detracts from the strategy of the game. These are the things which, in my mind, keep The Unholy War from being a classic Must Buy. The game engine and concept have all of the pieces there are just a few hiccoughs in the execution. On the disc, there is also a demo of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. The demo is so prominent in the interface that I have to wonder if Eidos rushed The Unholy War so that the Soul Reaver demo would be available. If so, they may have misjudged which of the two games has the potential to be a true classic. The Unholy War definitely had the potential and falls only slightly short. Strategy and fight game fans should all check it out. Anyone who has ever enjoyed a game of chess or wanted to play that game with Chewbacca and R2D2 will enjoy The Unholy War. Just don't pull anyone's arms out of their sockets if they should beat you. |
