Pretty Good Effort

Hierarchy walker going boom under Novus attack.

I must admit that I'm not a RTS lover, but I used to enjoy early Command & Conquer and Starcraft titles quite a bit, and I'm definitely looking forward to Starcraft 2. For me, Universe at War is a game that I would have probably skipped had I not been assigned to review it. Mostly because RTS games are not really my thing. Regardless, I must admit that it does a lot of things right, and the downsides are minor. The UI, unit design and visuals are all good, and while the single player campaign has it's flaws, multiplayer more than makes up for it - assuming you are happy to pay for the Live subscription.

So, if you are looking for a good stop-gap RTS to pass the time before Starcraft 2 arrives, and enjoy a more traditional approach to the genre, Universe at War: Earth Assault is a fine choice. It doesn't really even try to provide anything exceptional or radically new, and instead concentrates on evolving the concept, mostly with innovative unit design. In the end, the bits that truly matter are in order - the game is polished, reasonably well balanced and very playable. Definitely worth taking a look, if your gaming system is good enough.

Summary of YouGamers Hardware Testing

The publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:

Component	Publisher's Minimum	Publisher's Recommended
Processor	Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz	Not specified
Memory	1024 MB
Graphics Card	128MB DirectX 9.0c card with Shader Model 2.0 support
Graphics Card Example	ATI Radeon X800 series / NVIDIA GeForce 7600 series
Free Disk Space	6 GB
Net Link	Broadband

To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:

Component	YouGamers Minimum	YouGamers Recommended
Processor	AMD Athlon 64 3500+ / Intel Pentium 4 3600 MHz	AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ / Intel Core 2 Duo E4500
Memory	1024 MB	2048 MB
Graphics Card	ATI Radeon X1800 GTO 256MB / NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GS 256MB	ATI Radeon HD 3850 512MB / NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB
Free Disk Space	6 GB	6 GB
Net Link	Broadband	Broadband

Scores

To learn more about our scoring methodology, please click here.

Gameplay	83	Good unit design, good playability and reasonably good UI, but most of the online play modes feel deserted due to the Games for Windows Live and the limitations placed on Silver accounts.
Graphics	85	Very impressive visual design with three completely unique sides, each packing numerous different units. Yet the actual models and terrain fail to truly impress, mostly due to console-derived limitations on texture resolution.
Audio	86	All around good audio, if you forgive the repetitive audio acknowledgements to movement orders.
Technology	82	DX10 performance issues without any remarkable visual gains drag down the score here, but if you forget DX10, UAW is stable and performs fine.

OVERALL

Online play suffers from the Games For Windows Live disease while the single player game is a tad short and heavily scripted. Single player mission difficulty also varies too much, and there are some minor path-finding issues. Still, a fairly good RTS to pass the time while you wait for Blizzard's Starcraft 2 to appear.

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