Galactic Assault: Prisoner of Power
Review - posted by YourConscience on Wed 14 November 2007, 07:55:47
Galactic Assault: Prisoner of Power Review
Recently I got a hold of Galactic Assault from Akella for reviewing purposes. Before I tried it, I had the faint impression that it's yet another RTS and was only interested in it due to its connection to the book "Prisoner of Power" by the brothers Arkadi and Boris Strugatzki. I liked the book a lot, because it had, as most books from the Strugatzkis, a lot of depth and many nice parallels to the real world, forms of dictatorships, resulting power struggles and so on.
I was curious how someone would make a game out of it without making it just a normal game with different graphics. To make matters short, my curiosity was disappointed. Essentially, Galactic Assault is just that other game from the same developers, Massive Assault, with different graphics and unit descriptions and with even less game play options.
Introduction
To make matters more detailed, first a brief description of the core gameplay for those unfamiliar with Massive Assault. The game plays out as a series of turn-based missions connected by a very weak story (from the game developers) set in a very well developed universe (from the Strugatzki brothers). Each mission gives you a small number of units, a very tight turn limit (never more than 30 turns) and an objective or two. Sometimes during the mission the objective suddenly changes. Sometimes there's also a base where you can construct new units or repair existing units.
The map is hexagonal and units have movement costs corresponding to their abilities. An attack by a unit may provoke a counter-attack. A random factor is added in that an attack may produce twice the damage. There is some replayability here despite the mission structure of the game, because units gain experience and you might want to play through a second time and try to keep all your units alive (which can be difficult at times).
The story
Let's begin with the interesting stuff, the story. In the book, the story left off with the vague possibility of Max, the hero of the book, having to mend things he damaged. Basically, in his idealistic view of the world he helped weaken the power of the dictator only to learn then that this wasn't a good idea. The game begins at this point by letting you defend the now weakened country from it's neighbours who all suddenly want to have a piece of the pie. In the beginning the game fits somehow to the story by giving you very few units and letting you try to defend against stronger enemies or by giving an interesting stealth mission (which I anyway ended solving in a very non-stealth way). However, during the second (out of four) campaign things begin to get repetitive and at the latest in the third campaign it becomes obvious that it's just the same over and over again, except that the numerical values of the involved units keep increasing. The game also doesn't progress any interesting story. Every next mission reads basically just like a reformulation of 'now, please, take on that much bigger force than yours'. Given the richly developed universe and the fact that the developers didn't have to change or develop the engine this is really a shame.
The missions and the AI
Another aspect that looks good at first but turns out to be bad later is the mission design. As I mentioned, the missions are all very short, usually less then 20 turns. They are obviously very well tested and there is also usually a very obvious solution strategy (often even explicitly given to you by the game narrator). However, this also means that there is nearly no variation possible. If it says you have to go through that canyon with those 3 units, then that means that whatever else you try, you'll either get destroyed, or run out of time. Sometimes I even felt that I didn't really have any influence on the gameflow, apart from doing obvious things like focusing the attack of nearby units. Thus the player only gets to play tactics, but is mostly deprived of big-picture strategic decisions.
Given this, the AI also doesn't have many possibilities and correspondingly it doesn't really matter whether the AI is any good. However, if it would be significantly better, some of the missions would be unsolvable, because the intended solution for some of the maps clearly takes the stupidity of the AI into account. One example is one of the last missions of the second campaign where the narrator even tells you that it will leave it's super-bomber undefended and tells you where to send your capturing detachment to circumvent its main army.
The graphics
Since so much of the marketing of this game is filled with talk about 'high-definition visuals' (right off the official site) I ought to say a few things about it. Well, the graphics are nice, but nothing special, really. And given that it's nothing more than a simple hex-based wargame with rather small maps and few different units, it's really embarrassing to have to suffer through the long loading times only due to the overvalued visuals. Add to that that the camera sometimes gets into the way and the only way to completely control the camera are keys on your keyboard - the mouse can only zoom and scroll. Then add that the game tries to depict a wasted environment, which means that most textures are something grey or something brown. And then add that on a mediocre system the framerates go down significantly for higher resolutions and you have yet another case of a game which actually suffers from being in 3D instead of a really nice and polished 2D view.
On the other hand, the art direction is quite nice. It's a mixture of cartoonish and realistic, which means you get the exaggerated size of units for easy telling of what's what without the stupid colors like pink or huge eyes that are added so often because some publishers think that every computer player likes manga. It's actually an equally safe guess that the opposite is the case.
What remains?
Having dealt with the core elements of this game, there remain several nit-picking issues. One example is the ability to repair units. Sure, you can bring a damaged unit back to your base, repair it and use again in battle. However, doing so costs at the minimum 6 turns (three turns bringing the unit to the depot and three other turns bringing it back to the front. And then you can usually repair only one unit at a time. All in all this means that this is a nearly useless feature because the entire mission might be over after 10 turns! Another issue is the lack of challenge. Sure, you could crank up the difficulty to hard (I was playing on normal). But that wouldn't make the mission have more objectives, more complicated or anything. It would only change some stats. Together with the lack of strategic decisions on behalf of the player this 'strategy' is a breeze to play. Only once did I have to restart a mission even though in every mission I just did what the narrator told me and thus won. The one time I had to restart I actually didn't understand initially what the narrator told me and did things differently, which didn't work out.
Another thing I really didn't understand is that they removed the fun global domination mode that Massive Assault had. This means that here you're really stuck with the missions and that's it. I really wonder why game developers think that that's the only way to do games. This game certainly would have profited a lot from at least this interesting type of skirmish mission. And I'd praise this game nearly to heavens if it would have another strategic layer which lets you conquer a whole world, complete with persistent battlefields and a global resource management.
Conclusions
Concludingly I have to say that this is a nice little game, but mostly because the turn-based hexagonal style of gameplay is just nearly unkillable. The connections to the Strugatzkis' book are very weak and extremely underdeveloped. The graphical resource overhead needed to run a game whose core gameplay is a slight simplification of Battle Isle draws away from this game more than it adds, but if your machine is powerful it at least doesn't get into the way too much. Being a copy of the Battle Isle gameplay is a good thing, too. It's very interesting to try to compute the optimal combination and order of attacks and to make use of your artillery.
Therefore, you might want to buy it if you either are a total fanatic for turn-based war games, or are a total newcomer to wargames and want to try one out. In the first case you anyway buy every wargame, and in the second case this game will represent an easy introduction to wargames for you and prepare you for the proper ones.
