While I’m happy to see that the space-sim industry is at least somewhat active over this recent year, each new title that comes out still brings with it a share of complaints on my part. Your average Star Trek game still doesn’t let you re-route power through the auxiliary plasma manifold while fending off boarding parties and trying to bring the main deflectors back online (I think Klingon Academy had it damn close at least, and it annoys me to no end that developers have completely veered away from that formula now). As another example, X3 offered brilliant graphics and some really huge gameplay scale, but tripped over itself with horrible fleet management and really basic combat mechanics. At the very least, what I’d love to see is a decently-crafted space ship game that offers the ability to actually re-enact my favorite battle scenes of Star Trek (or the more recent Battlestar Galactica) with at least a small amount of accuracy, rather than just being a case of “fire at target, repeat”. So it’s on that note that I ended up obtaining Universal Combat: Special Edition, which promised to fill in the gaping holes in my gaming experience. But this yields a very important question: Does it succeed – and if so, how well?

Upon first glance, it’s immediately obvious that the scope of this game is huge, with a development philosophy on curb-stomping simplicity. This is evident by the almost hundred-page-tutorial included with the game, which I should mention is almost mandatory reading material to grasp the basics and (for example) understanding the difference between the “TOM” and the “ITD” displays. Helpfully the complete documentation is included in PDF format with the game, so running the game in windowed mode on first boot-up to quickly multitask between the screens is highly advisable. Here’s the concept: In a galaxy filled with huge selection of sectors (many of them complete with planets, which you can physically go down and visit on a whim), players can choose their race and career path, and then be released unto the galaxy to do… well, whatever they damn well please. Actually, to be specific, the game does offer a number of modes, with “Roam” being the aforementioned free-form element, and other options like a scripted campaign and “instant action” scenarios available to drop players into the heart of the action. There’s also a multiplayer feature included too (!) which I’ll be commenting on later in this article. For most starting players however, the “Roam” mode will be the most attractive option. In this mode, you make a choice on which race, caste (Military, Police, Scientist, etc) and actual career you want to engage in, and then give yourself (and your “asset”, if applicable, such as your carrier) a name. Then you’re cut loose in the game, with (mostly) no specific scripted boundaries on what you are or aren’t allowed to do.

Speaking of career choices, probably one of the most interesting parts of the game is just the sheer amount of choices available to a player. You’re no longer rigidly tied to seeing the game world from just a single perspective – instead, if run-and-gun is your style, you can become a ground or space-borne marine, or perhaps instead go in as a dedicated fighter pilot. There are also options for becoming a trader, or an explorer – but the one that offers the most functionality is of course the “Commander” career, where you’re plopped into a cruiser or carrier of your choice, and then challenged with managing all of its assets and staying alive.

I’m using the word “challenged” in a literal sense too – there is a lot to manage. The game tracks just about everything onboard your ship, from inane cargo items, to fuel, missiles, spare parts, a multitude of independent subsystems and components, the fighters and support craft, and even the personnel. Every ship has it’s own staff compliment that help make the ship run properly; medics run about the ship, tending to injured crewmates, while flight and system engineers ready fighters for takeoff or effect any ordered repairs to the command ship and it’s sub-vessels. A compliment of marines are also onboard to fend off intruders to your ship or handle ground-based away missions, and finally this is all tied together by your command staff (and yourself, who also exists as an individual “crew member” on the ship, who can move to different areas or be independently killed, after which it’s an instant game-over). As a cool touch, your entire staff can also be tracked in real-time through the game’s “PerScan” screen, though sadly only in a text-based format, and without the benefit of 3D schematics or overlays- though the system is still perfectly functional for what it does. Managing this staff properly can be a key aspect to keeping your ship in good condition, as each crew member has his or her own life and fatigue levels (along with an “AI” rating that improves with time), so players need to know when to take their crew off-duty or send them to the medlab – although in most cases I noticed the command crew handled this job automatically in a fairly reliable manner.

Just imagining some of the situational possibilities this presents can be enough to get any hardcore space sim fan salivating. There’s so much to manage that planning any assault is a major affair of risk-versus-benefit – do you send in your fighters first, to soften up the enemy in advance, but risk damage or even the loss of your relatively fragile (and expensive to replace) fighter craft? Or instead personally deploy your battle barge into the field and hope the enemy doesn’t have any surprises up their sleeves? The dynamic “roaming” option especially gives the game’s varied AI styles a chance to shine in this respect, and you’ll be able to tell the difference between novice enemies, or those who prefer to cloak their craft and sneak up to deliver a killing blow. But all of this applies mainly for the space aspect, and it’s easy to forget that many planets are actually inhabited too, rife with bases for you to assault or destroy - there’s no restricted surface transition like in other games, and you can actually choose where you want to set down on the planet in real-time.

For a game with so many possibilities however, the execution is a vital element. Not only does everything need to be wrapped into a well-designed interface, but there also needs to be an underlying push to keep the player going – a solid feeling of progression and purpose. To handle the first part (the interface), Universal Combat has the challenge of giving the player all of this information about his or her fleet in an easy-to-access manner. The approach used by the game lies in a mix of multi-tiered menus, graphical HUD displays, and mostly just a heck of a lot of text. The real trick to the game however is that, in order to manage everything effectively, players need to know exactly where to find a crucial piece of information quickly, or risk being screwed. Now part of my concern in this regard applies clearly to the learning curve involved (in that it just takes a good deal of time before you can reflexively order your flight engineers to prep fighters for re-launch as they dock, or setting up the “FATAL” system for a multi-missile barrage in the middle of a pitched battle) but as time went on, I started to find areas the interface could definitely use some streamlining to help improve the experience drastically.

Probably one of the most hindering things about the game is the need to constantly jump between screens constantly to stay on top of your ship affairs. Certainly, it makes sense to have dedicated separate screens for things like launch control details, cargo management, fine-tuning subsystem repairs, etc – but having to do it all the time just to carry out common tasks gets a little tedious (if not downright catastrophic in the middle of a combat situation). At the very least having things like a more comprehensive damage display and a PerScan readout as modular features I could apply directly to the HUD would have helped immensely – but with the advent of higher resolutions and widescreen monitors, a new approach to the interface is something I’d love to see to try and cram even more information into the common displays. Something else at the top of my wishlist too would be dual monitor support. I’m probably just spoiled by the Supreme Commander beta (who isn’t?), but having the game’s dedicated “TACOPS” display (which offers an independent 3D tactical view of the local area for ordering stuff around and seeing what’s going on) constantly enabled on my secondary display would be a fantastic enhancement to the whole experience – especially when there’s barely enough interface-room to keep things coherent as it is.

I should also mention some issues I ran into when trading for items at bases. Objects that are useful versus objects that aren’t (i.e. generic trade goods) aren’t particularly well sorted, and much to my embarrassment I ran into a problem where I was blindly selling off some spare crap I had picked up after a battle, and then moved on to accidentally selling off half my store of reactor fuel (fuel is vital in the game for survival) before I remembered that “Radine” wasn’t exactly a “Normal Mineral” – it was fuel (yet was classified under “Normal Minerals” regardless). Fortunately little tool-tips appear at the lower right giving a brief description of whatever you’re about to sell or buy (such as “FUEL/REACTOR” in the case of my little snafu), but the very limited information shown eventually gave way to another problem, in the form of the “Upgrade” system. To date, I’ve probably logged at least five hours overall digging through the appendix data during gameplay, and even after this I’m still vague on the statistical difference between the various upgrades. Sure, it’s obvious that upgrading a shield or engine will result in better performance – but by how much exactly, and are there any other downsides or other performance changes? Likewise, what can I expect from a reactor or engine upgrade before I spend my hard-earned credits on it?

Statistical information on this sadly doesn’t seem to be forthcoming in neither the appendix, nor the in-game interface (if it is, I haven’t found it yet), making the whole upgrade approach much more awkward than it needs to be, especially since upgrades are lumped in as “spare parts” and not separated in any way from other everyday spare parts (of which there are tons - I kept looking for a flux capacitor in the list, but couldn’t find one). But going back to my description concern, the same sadly applies with missiles, fighters, and even command craft; so expect to spend plenty of time rooting through the documentation trying to figure out the difference between an “ANALOG” and “RADIX” missile since there isn’t much in the game interface that will offer any kind of helping hand. This isn’t a tremendous problem, and (like many games) is knowledge that just comes with enough time and research – but I just see no reason why the stats can’t be available for direct comparison through the game as you’re making hard choices on these items, rather than being forced to either blindly choose on the fly, or dig through external documentation sheets first.

My ultimate point however is that the interface approach that worked back in the old DOS days (where the Universal Combat series originated from – or more specifically, the Battlecruiser series) just isn’t as optimal in modern-day gaming, when so many different approaches exist now to compare by – yet the game effectively relies on a very similar interface style regardless. It works, no question, and once you get the basics down things begin to flow naturally, but it just kept occurring to me over and over again that there are better ways now of presenting the UI to the player without compromising functionality, and just streamlining the process for much greater playability and efficiency.