Universe at War 360 Update
Last year's capable strategy game is coming soon to an Xbox 360 near you. We took a look.
Longtime strategy developer Petroglyph released Universe at War: Earth Assault late last year onto PCs, but it didn't get much of a break afterward. Since then, the team has been hard at work on the Xbox 360 version of Universe at War, set for release at the end of March. Like its PC counterpart, the game will offer three distinctly different races with unique building models, offensive abilities, and upgrade potential. Read our review of the PC version for more info.
Petroglyph has made numerous changes to the 360 game, mostly on the interface side, to make it more accessible to those playing it with a traditional thumbstick-based controller. Primarily, the heads-up display has been scaled down and moved from the bottom to the top of the screen, allowing you to see more of the action at once. At the bottom, you'll now see some hovering prompts instructing you on which buttons you can hit to access various menus. One of these new menus lets you access the unit product queues of any of your buildings from anywhere on the map, without having to physically move your perspective to the location of those buildings.
Wisely, the designers have gone to great lengths to minimize the amount of precise cursor controlling you'll have to do to select units and so forth. The D pad snap-to control sounds like the most useful; it will let you go from unit to unit with a tap of the D pad, naturally. It's also directional, so you can hit up to snap to the closest group of units upward from your current perspective. This snap-to control also extends to more specific functions, such as the upgradeable hard points on the Hierarchy's massive walkers. You can use the D pad to cycle through those as well.
There are a number of face button-based shortcuts too. You can tap and double-tap various buttons to select all the units on the screen, select only the units onscreen of a certain type, or select all of the units on the entire map. Instead of the typical selection box that most strategy games use, Universe at War will let you hold down the A button and simply "paint" over the units you want to select. This will hopefully make it a little easier to assign those all-important control groups in the absence of a keyboard and mouse.
Multiplayer is a big part of any real-time strategy game, and Petroglyph has managed to get the 360 game working online with the PC original. Interestingly, you won't be able to tell whether the player you're facing off against is playing on the 360 or PC. Company reps say that players using the Xbox 360 controls in their internal testing are capably holding their own against players on the PC, and, in fact, the 360 game will even contain achievements related to beating PC users in multiplayer. The RTS genre has traditionally been a hard one to fit onto consoles, but it looks like Petroglyph is taking the necessary steps to smooth the transition on this one.
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