Galactic Assault: Prisoner of Power
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ESRB:
Mild Violence
Publisher: Paradox Interactive Genre(s): Strategy Home Page: http://www.galacticassault.com/
Polygons and hexesUnlike most hex-style turn based games, Galactic Assault is fully rendered in 3D and actually uses pixel shaders, lighting and particle effects to polish up the presentation. Screenshots and the somewhat misleading trailer on the first page actually look a lot like many RTS games, but the game is firmly turn-based and the combat is just presented with animated units moving and firing on the map. There is also a day/night cycle and a weather system affecting both the visual appearance and the gameplay - as an example, at night the vision of all units is shorter, and it's possible to flank around the enemy under the cover of darkness.
While the technical side of the game is quite passable, polygon counts are fairly low and the visuals are, for the lack of a better term, a bit sterile. Units don't stand out of the terrain very well and in many ways it feels like the game is sorely lacking in terms of art direction. If you just look at a single unit model or combat effect, they are quite passable for a strategy title, but the whole package just feels flat and uninspiring. The atmosphere isn't getting any help from the rudimentary mission voiceovers that explain the scenarios with the enthusiasm of a dead bingo announcer. Conflicting system requirementsWhile the 3D representation of the game area does require a bit of computing power to render, the frame rate is fairly irrelevant in games like this. Even if the unit animations jerk around at 10 fps, the game is still playable. As to what the publisher suggests, there are actually two sets of requirements available. GamersGate, Paradox Interactive's online market recommends a system like this:
At the same time, Galactic Assault official site lists the following requirements:
In this case we erred on the side of caution and list the higher requirements as publisher's minimum, but I can happily report that the game runs pretty well with all settings maximized on a system meeting these specifications, and the actual minimum is well below the listed requirements.
Everything maximized - this is what you get with the YouGamers recommended setup.
The YouGamers minimum system can also run the game at the maximum settings if you don't mind the choppy frame rate. However, if you drop the settings to low, it's still quite playable and not much uglier. As the game uses pixel shaders sparingly, in theory, any PS1.1 card (ATI Radeon 8500 or NVIDIA GeForce 3 and up, disregarding the GeForce 4 MX) should be able to run the game. The YouGamers recommended system (a 3Ghz CPU and
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