There’s one more subject I want to touch on before leaving the interface topic, and that’s the first person mode. As a particularly awesome touch, you can hit Alt+E at any time to exit your craft and enter first person mode – or load yourself into the ship’s transporter or a shuttlecraft and send yourself down to the surface of a planet (assuming you’re playing the Commander mode, of course). For a game like this, it’s certainly not a feature I’ve seen before and I’m happy for the incredible novelty it offers – but when put into practice, even this needs improving. My largest complaint stems from trying to lead an entire assault force against an enemy base, where basically the best thing to do is throw a ton of units into the fray and hope for the best – or just pull out and nuke from orbit (which is an actual option I’m proud to say). The reason for this is that the game doesn’t really provide an easy means to command your troops directly. The “TACOPS” screen, while providing a handy strategic overview, lacks any kind of command-box dragging or control-group creation, meaning each unit has to be commanded individually. But if you’re in first person mode and in the middle of a fight, switching to TACOPS in real-time isn’t quite practical anyways. This is addressed somewhat by the inclusion of the “TOM”, or “Team Orders Menu”, which lets you add entities to a “priority” list. You can then quickly select those entities in real-time by hitting the “Tab”, key, and finally hit “ESC” to bring up a menu for issuing orders. But while this works well enough for smaller engagements, again the process falls apart when trying to lead larger platoons into battle where I found myself having to stand there and issue the same order to several different units just to get a bunch of guys to “go there” or “shoot at this thing”. Again, this ultimately just led me to throw masses of units at a target with automatic orders to engage anything in range (and to the game’s credit, several AI automation commands exist with the exact purpose of making this process easier), so the game definitely could benefit from a much better way to command larger teams of units for micromanagement freaks like myself who prefer having a tighter sense of control over their team.

Let’s move on to the other part of the execution – the progression. As your ship gets more and more powerful (through your own knowledge as a commander, the AI development of your crew, and the value of the assets you can bring to bear), eventually you can start working your way into enemy-held sectors, assault and capture their bases, and even gain control over allied fleets if your ranking goes high enough. The only problem with this is pretty much the same problem I’ve run into with any other free-form game (the X series comes to mind) where, once you’ve achieved complete military dominance, there really isn’t too much of a reason to keep going beyond your own imagination. It’s probably around this point that it would be good to break into the game’s more advanced options, such as the storyline-driven “ACM” campaign modes - which offer further options still, but could be enhanced further with a slightly more dramatic flair on the storyline and some cutscene action to drive the plot forward and keep the player interested. My personal wet dream would involve a combination of Universal Combat’s powerful free-form complexity with Freespace 2’s immersive storyline approach, but sadly I don’t think we’ll get there any time soon.

In terms of graphics engine, I’m left with mixed feelings. Some research on my part makes it abundantly clear that the game’s dynamic universe makes for some huge processing overhead, which puts a limit on the amount of graphical options in use for the game. That’s understandable, but regardless I was still expecting a little more eye-candy to go around. Maneuvering thrusters, for example are one fine detail that’s missing, and there isn’t really any damage scarring on the hulls of ships either – only some extra particle effects that fly out when a vessel is crippled. Actually, up-close ships don’t really have that much detail to offer at all (I couldn’t even make out any running lights), and when I started zooming out, I noticed a weird anomaly where the textures seemed to gradually “blur” on the ship in a rather unattractive manner. The clipping in the game also seems to have some problems of its own, and trying to walk across the hull of my ship (either in space or while landed on a planet) turned into a very jittery affair. The troop animations when moving on the ground are also quite limited – it doesn’t even seem like most characters have up / down animations to show exactly how they was oriented externally. Still, when I take into account that no other game has tried anything quite on the scope of this title, I can’t deny that I’m left without a basis for comparison to draw from aside from “this could be better” (though I’m the other hand, I’m left wondering if a dual-core approach would open up much more flexibility for graphical enhancement, now that the tech is becoming pretty standard). That’s not to say that the graphics aren’t perfectly passable - it just feels like a slight step backwards after spending the last few years playing the latest Freespace 2 open source builds, Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, and even other games like Darkstar One.

But on a positive note, one of my most favorite experiences from the game was landing my entire command ship onto the surface of a planet, hopping out with a small team of soldiers, and turning back to see my gigantic ship impressively stretched out across the terrain, partly obscured by mountains and hills – just seeing that sight made the experience worth it (and I want to emphasize that you probably won’t get this kind of vista in any other game). Again though, I badly wish I could see it in more detail, especially given how the terrain is so limited both in geometry and detail – there isn’t even any effect if regular gunfire hits the ground near you, leading to some slightly awkward situational awareness problems when engaging enemies on foot. At the very least my framerates stayed consistently high, though I am running a top of the line gaming system - a friend of mine on a slightly slower setup with a Radeon 9800 Pro did encounter some severe framerate problems when interacting with bases on a planet (but otherwise the game ran fine), and try as I might, I couldn’t get the singleplayer engine to crash once.

Which sadly wasn’t the case for multiplayer. Multiplayer is probably one of the most intriguing parts to this game that I was looking forward to checking out – the singleplayer aspect already has this insane level of interactivity and detail, so what kind of awesome would happen combined with other players? As it stands, there actually are a few changes gameplay-wise; multiplayer is restricted to it’s own, smaller version of the universe, and also comes with some functional limitations (mainly on what kind of craft you can tow, and what kind of orbital weapons you can deploy – though you also can’t capture stations) – but beyond this, everything is intact, including the dynamic universe system with NPCs of all sorts tending to their own business, and there are even a couple of optional pre-scripted co-op missions you can engage in with friends. I was generously provided a second CD key to pass onto a friend so we could give this mode a thorough workout, and while it was quite an experience for the first little while, we eventually started hitting stability problems. At random, the online servers we were playing on seemed to go down and become inaccessible – so after a little while, I tried running my own server for us to play on. Eventually however even this local server actually began crashing on me when we applied the same stimulus we had for the online modes (mainly landing on a planet, parking our cruisers next to each other, and hopping into first person mode to take silly photos), so I’m not entirely sure what the problem was – it seemed like switching to first person mode in particular seemed to especially induce a shutdown or disconnect most often, but sometimes we’d just be flying through space when it would happen too.

Regrettably we eventually had to abort our attempts because multiplayer also doesn’t have a save feature (and it was just too much trouble to start from scratch each time), but if the kinks are worked out, I can foresee a lot of promise in online play. Particularly as the latency wasn’t too bad – though we did still get a good deal of jumpiness when tracking NPC entities. Oh, and speaking of “promise”, the final rendition of the game is currently in the works (”Universal Combat Online”) and, among other things, will promote some major MMO-specific improvements, a graphical facelift, and other changes. The game’s expected to hit open beta in late 2007 (with a final release shortly thereafter), so I’ll be following up on this just to see exactly what improvements are brought to the table.

I think when it all comes down to it, Universal Combat: Special Edition has its largest strength in just plunging the player into unique, intense, and even sometimes hilarious conditions. My family couldn’t help but comment on the stream of curses that left my mouth when a team of intruders beamed directly onto the bridge of my ship, leaving my bridge crew and my alter-ego to fend for themselves while the marines all jammed themselves into the turboshaft and tried valiantly to make their way up in time. And that’s just one example – the game has left me with a trail of fond memories, like the first time I experimented with the “FATAL” system and inadvertently unloaded half of my ship’s missile complement onto a hapless shuttlecraft, or the time a mysterious sickness overtook my crew and I ended up having to fight my way through a swarm of fighters with half my staff hanging out in sickbay. I sure can’t deny that the game has left me impressed with the possibilities it presents, but the design is set up in such a way that only hardcore science fiction fans will find it appealing enough to stick it out – and even then, it’s a tremendous hurdle to actually get into and fully enjoy the game. At the very least, Universal Combat: Special Edition is probably one of the most misunderstood titles of the industry, but thankfully this latest rendition offers enough improvements to make it nothing less than a very fascinating prospect in the right hands. Hardcore enthusiasts who take the right approach of just spending the time needed to completely immerse themselves into the game (and I’m talking a lot of time – there isn’t even any time acceleration) should find the experience ultimately very enjoyable, but for lesser players, there’s definite room for improvement to help make the game more successful all around.

I’ll close with the statement that with the right overhauls to the interface and a graphical facelift, this could be well on its way to being one of the jewels of the genre – but for now I’d still recommend it to any members of this niche audience who are sick of seeing the latest in space gaming being dumbed down for the masses and want to try something that harkens a little closer back towards the golden days of gaming (so long as you don’t mind the Starforce protection…). Learn more about the game by visiting www.3000ad.com .