You see the big problem IC games have is that all your animals still conform rigidly to the whole rock, paper, stones formula. You will need to have some artillery for ranged attacks, requiring things such as rock hurling chimps or spitting archer fish components in your beasts. Then you will need some brawlers, so get a great white onto a bull’s body or an alligator onto a cheetah. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. All of the fun of building your uber monster is taken away by the fact that have done nothing to come up with a new take on how units fight one another. The vast numbers of combinations mean it can also become bloody hard to know what little fluffy beast does what, leading to frustration and selecting everything on screen and sending them off towards the enemy base in a single attack.

The interface is superb, games are easy to join and there is a full statistical database held on all players and games. Which means you can quickly find out what the most popular units are and construct your army accordingly. Which is precisely what happens and makes a mockery of the whole idea of having so many potential units to choose from. Oh well.

These are problems which isn’t doesn’t seem the long time helped to overcome. Which is a shame as the rest of the package is superbly done.

The single player game doesn’t suffer from the same problems as the multiplayer, except for one biggie which I shall come to later. The basic story behind the campaign is entertaining and has a very pulp fiction/Saturday serials feel to it. It all centres on the activities of a mad scientist, his nefarious sponsor, a beautiful and brilliant assistant and you, the plucky and heroic adventurer determined to come to the bottom of the mystery. It is well presented with some fine voice acting and does a better than average job of holding the missions together and making a coherent campaign.

The whole interface is nicely done and comes with ample tool tips to make sure that you never get lost. The graphics are solid and colourful without being too cartoony. There are some nice locations to fight over and some pleasant effects to bring you into the game world. The creatures themselves are a sight to behold, and the zoom able camera allows you to have a good gander at the new products of your animal labs. The first time you see a flying gorilla you will laugh – humour is one of this games strong points, and is all the better for so much of it being incidental in nature. Playing this game is very easy to do, and even if the idea of having so many creatures to create might seem daunting, the game enforces a limit of nine creatures on any one map which helps keep any confusion levels as low as can be hoped for.

There isn’t much in the way of improvements to be built either. Of course your animals can be toughened up, but this only affects their numerical abilities and gives you nothing new to play with. And then there’s the fact that you can only research seven new things to affect your builders and bases. Which can be done in a matter of minutes. Which leaves not much else to do apart from fight. Now while this was an intention of the developers, especially in wanting multiplayer games to be short affairs, it saps much of the enjoyment to be had in building up a strong economy and unstoppable army. And it is the second big problem I have with the game. I quickly bored of the single player missions as there isn’t much variety to be had and the multiplayer game left me feeling kind of hollow for the afore-mentioned reasons.

Which is a shame as the game is so well built that it cries out to be heaped with attention. In my opinion Relic wanted to get this thing finished so they could concentrate on the impending Homeworld 2 and therefore left the gameplay mechanics incongruously simple in light of the possibly mind-bending qualities of the unit creation process. This in my opinion makes it a great game for the RTS novice. It includes all the staples of the genre such as base building, resource collection and army construction while stripping away the many layers of depth that can make game such as Warcraft and C&C seem so initially daunting. For those of us well steeped in the ethos of the genre it is a well made and very pretty game whose promises of a new experience don’t deliver in quite the manner we would hope for. But as a game to be given to those who we one day hope to dominate in one of our favourite RTS games, it’s a wise choice.

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By Sam Gibson