Urban Assault

SET in the far future, sometime after “The Big Mistake”, Urban Assault is played out on an Earth that humankind has ravaged.

There is little left except ruined cities and wasteland. What is left though, is viciously fought over.

Not only are different factions of humankind engaging in battle over the desiccated remains, but aliens are also invading.

The Mykonians and Sulgogars want to have Earth to themselves, to use as a giant nesting ground. They’re prepared to fight each other and the last remnants of humanity to get it.

The other human forces on the planet are the Ghorkovs and the Taerkastens, last of the great Empires. With so few people left alive, most war is waged by giant robots and machines.

You have been hooked up to a huge control centre called the Host Station. From where you can create and command a legion of combat units, including tanks, bombers, planes, helicopters, and anti-air tanks.

Urban Assault is a combination of two popular computer game genres: First-person-shooters, such as Quake and Dark Forces, and real-time strategy games like Command and Conquer and Total Annihilation.

You order around the units on the basic map in real-time, just like the strategy games, but in Urban Assault you can jump into the cockpit of any of your units at any time. If your tanks are taking a pounding, double click on one from the map, and suddenly you’re in the thick of the action.

Urban Assault isn’t the first to combine these two genres. Battlezone is similar, and has a huge online following.

As in the usual real-time strategy game there is also an element of resource management. You need to gather and conserve Energy, with which you create new units for battle. Energy is gained when you take over Power Stations, and also when you destroy other units, by gathering the plasma left behind.

There are technology upgrades available, with which you can increase the number of vehicle types to create.

The main campaign has you gradually taking over Earth, by choosing which part of Earth to attack. There are several maps available, corresponding to areas in Europe, America, and so on. Each new mission has a video introduction, some of which are quite fun to watch.

The multi-player game lets you play as any of the human or alien races, and try out their different vehicles.

The action in the solo campaign game starts off quite well, with a few training missions to get you up to speed. After a wee while though, it all becomes a bit monotonous. It’s hard to know when to direct the battle from the map, and when to jump in to take over the battle yourself.

The action when in the cockpit is fast and furious. It doesn’t take much to knock out these vehicles, and they are so easy to produce (at least at the easier levels), that you don’t really worry too much about just charging in blasting.

That’s where the game falls down. It just doesn’t quite grab your attention enough to make you really care about each unit – they are all disposable. That leaves you with the real-time strategy part of the game, which is still quite fun.

The action is all viewed in 3D mode though. There is no top-down view, so you have to use the line-drawn map, which is not quite up to Total Annihilation graphics standards.

Urban Assault is Microsoft and costs $99 (including gst). It requires a Pentium 133-meghertz processor, 16 megabytes of Ram, quad-speed CD-Rom drive, SVGA card, soundcard, and mouse. It recommends a 3D graphics card, joystick, and supports multi-player gaming by Internet and modem.