Viva la revolution!

The roll call

You have but seventeen ships to choose from, including your command ship, your processor ship and your workers. This is rather disappointing, but the good news is that not only is each one of the ships totally unique, but of the four factions, three of them have entirely unique ships, the fourth, the Beast makes up its fleet from everyone else's ships.

With your seventeen ships you have EMP technology, you can fire long range missiles from your dreadnought or push them back with a repulsor blast. Your carriers can build ships on their own away from the command ship, and your destroyers are equipped with more weapons than you can shake a stick at. Let's not forget your leeches, which can latch on to a ship and spy, consume, or steal resources from it.

Beast ship booty

Repairing after a tremendous fight

Also in the dubious area of silent death you also have the Mimic, and the MCV which can cloak as an enemy ship to get close, and then kamikaze with devastating effect. The good news is that you are a group of miners and are adapt at salvaging. You can salvage any ship that isn't tainted by the beast. Which means that you are capable of having all the ships at your disposal.

Each one of the ships is unique which makes up for the lack of numbers, but not entirely. I would have very much so like to have seen forty ships per faction, and more than three fighters on the Somtaaw side. Fighters play a big role in the early game, but are totally ineffective in the late game. Even the largest squadron is hard pressed to take out a single enemy frigate and will probably take half the game to take out a capital ship. I never managed to take out a capital ship with fighters unless it was heavily damaged by another capital class ship.

They got the drop

My station!

What to do, what to do

As the page title suggests, the gameplay is so much more than three dimensional goodness. One of the things that folks are often taught when reviewing or critiquing is the "one word" technique, and if I was forced to use this technique, the word wouldn't be chaotic, but epic. Epic? We're talking Lawrence of Arabia here, Braveheart eat your heart out. It feels like the spirit of Akira Kurosawa, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander the Great and George Lucas all fused into one. Besides being the Serpentor of video games, it's also all kinds of fun.

The single player campaign follows the learning curve that most real time strategy games do, as the campaign unfolds you will eventually be privy to more and more technology. This begins with simple fighters and workers, and ends with the hulking dreadnought super capital ship and the omnipotent siege cannon.

Multiple multibeams

Destroyer goodness

The early parts of the single player campaign emphasize fighters heavily, though frigates and other small class capital ships can do some damage, you generally won't have the resources to make them nor are the maps designed to put them to good use. The early part of the single player campaign is pretty boring.

After about mission seven, the game gets really interesting, you have a lot of your capital research available, and the campaign begins demanding the use of this technology more and more. You'll find yourself retiring your acolytes to make use of their resource units to make bigger and badder frigates.