Urban Assault

The Good
The hybrid FPS/RTS is a type of game you see every now and then, but never with any regularity. Urban Assault builds on the premise of games like Battlezone, and while an interesting experiment it falls pretty flat as a game. You command a rag-tag force of machines in a decaying urban wasteland, carrying on an epic war against neo-communists and neo-fascists. Also, aliens are landing and want to turn you into plant food.

Urban Assault combines elements of both action and strategy. On one hand, you must capture and maintain power stations. build tanks, aircraft and combat vehicles, and lead them into battle using the familiar point and click interface. On the other, you actually get into the cockpit of a vehicle or aircraft and fight alongside your warriors in 1st person perspective. This is Urban Assault's main selling point: instead of simply ordering your troops around you become an actual participant in the battles.

Other than some issues that will be dealt with below, the shooter portions of Urban Assault are excellent. Anyone who thinks that aerial dogfights in the middle of a cityscape aren't cool lacks a sense of fun. And since the game is set far in the future with seemingly impossible technology there's a clothesline for some really kick ass action sequences. The non-linear nature of the game's levels (it's part strategy remember) means you have a dynamic strategy-based shooter dependent on luck and skill rather than memorizing enemy and weapon placement.

The game knows what its strong points are, and therefore a lot of attention has been put into designing the individual machines the player controls. You have low-end scout vehicles, moving up to powerful tanks and heavily-armored ATVs. As for aircraft there are bombers, fighter jets, and helicopters (Flight Simulator fans will have an easy time here, as the controls are very similar). Each vehicle has its own pros and cons (different range, attack power, speed, etc) and has a customized look with high-tech cross-hairs and screen overlays, and even individual control schemes, which takes some getting used to but goes a long way to making the vehicles feel unique, which I suppose is what they wanted.

The graphical engine is similar to Serious Sam's, which is to say it isn't terribly good looking but excels in throwing lots of digital bad guys around the screen. They even gave us semi-destructible environments with buildings and houses that can be blown up and earth that can be blackened with explosions.

You can jump into any vehicle at any time, and the game doesn't penalize you if you get killed (your command just changes over to the nearest available vehicle). Battles can get very hectic with literally dozens of planes and tanks on each side bombarding each other, and Urban Assault succeeds really well in giving you that chaotic, out of control, just-shoot-and-hope-you-hit-something feeling. The auto-misfire mechanism means you can't kill anyone from your own side, which is a much-appreciated feature since the planes and tanks of each faction look almost the same except for the aliens. The combat model isn't very deep or even very realistic. If I've made it sound like a simulation, it isn't. Urban Assault's FPS portion is little more than an arcade shooter with a few squad-based elements. But it's still good for what it is.

The Bad
The RTS portion, however, flat out sucks. You command your soldiers using an ugly, cumbersome interface that looks like it belongs in Windows 3.1. Moving a group of tanks means bringing up a huge grid interface that obscures 90% of the screen (if you're getting shot at, tough luck), and issuing an order to the group of uniformly-shaped blips you hope represents your units. Yeah, all units on the map grid are rendered as identical colored dots, so you have no way of knowing if a certain blip is a tank, helicopter, fighter jet, or whatever. The buttons and various command functions are illogically placed all over the screen and can't be hot-keyed. Unit AI is passable, but you'll still get the odd case of vehicles getting lost and planes flying around in circles.

This is an example of a fundamental problem in Urban Assault: it feels like they spent 99% of their effort on the FPS aspect and neglected the RTS aspect. I know that the explosions and mayhem of first-person mode are what most people (read: critics) will have most of their attention on, but since the player spends a lot of time in command mode couldn't they have given us a half-decent interface to work with? Even with a better interface it's not like the strategy side of the game is crash hot. You build the strongest type of tank/aircraft you can, point and click at the nearest enemy, then switch over to FPS mode. Some strategy.

Even the shooter part of the game gets old fast. Urban Assault falls victim to what might be called "Halo syndrome", where the game had maybe eight hours of gameplay in it but that's too short so they bloated it out to forty with completely pointless filler missions. The game deserves praise for being one of the first totally non-linear shooters, but this has the consequence of making each mission practically the same except progressively harder (your computer-controlled opponents behave in exactly in the same manner time after time, and soon you'll learn to predict their movements and tactics). The problem is exacerbated by the fact that all missions also look the same. From the beginning of the game to its end you'll be playing in dingy cities with cloudy skies and not to mention a serious overdose of the color gray.

The story is crap and is little more than an excuse for about 30 missions of repetitive joystick-hammering action. Far worse, Urban Assault unintentionally kills the very thing it tries to sell itself with (immersion into the game) by turning itself into the equivalent of an arcade shooter.

When I order a bunch of helicopters into the sky, I want to see their rotors spinning and exhaust billowing into the air. Instead, they slowly float up as if they're being pulled by invisible strings. Tanks can rotate on the spot, aircraft can crash into the ground, into buildings, and into each other without taking damage, and all vehicles carry infinite ammo which doesn't make much sense in context. When vehicles are destroyed, they vanish in a blue particle explosion and don't leave any wreckage behind. It feels as if you're controlling cardboard models instead of actual vehicles and planes made of metal. Urban Assault is so unrealistic they unintentionally shoot themselves in the foot by removing the very element that could have made it successful.

...those aren't overwhelming problems on their own, but when piled on top of each other they bury the good aspects of the game under their weight. Urban Assault has some good ideas, but at its core it's just a really, really mediocre game.

The Bottom Line
Urban Assault ends up feeling like an industry demo that got green lit for a hasty commercial release. There's probably nothing wrong with it that couldn't have been fixed by a few more months in development. It's a cool idea, but that's where it stops.