The game I played most this week: Machines at War

Your Battle: Machines at War

Machines at War is one of the more ambitious titles I've seen in a while. We aren't really seeing too many of these higher-end titles anymore, with the remaining developers mostly sticking to simpler and easier to produce titles. With the platform quickly moving to phones (which are smaller and simpler in terms of input methods than Pocket PCs), it makes even less sense to develop games requiring longer play sessions and more complicated input from the user.

One holdout to this trend is Machines at War, a brand new title from Isotope 244. What I like about these guys is the amount of detail they cram into their games. Their titles are definitely targeted toward more serious gamers, and even their simpler titles have a surprising amount of depth and features. Their Joust clone, for example, had RPG-like level advancement, specialized missions, and upgradeable weapons.

Machines at War is their take on the Real Time Strategy genre. I've probably said before that I'm not huge on RTS games on the Pocket PC, mainly because they tend to require longer gaming sessions, and keeping tracking of tiny units on such a small screen is a little hard on the eyes. But let's face it, RTS games are definitely a Big Deal in the gaming world and exist on just about every platform (although I don't think many people play them on the consoles, but those are generally meant for a younger audience anyway).

Machines at War is definitely the most significant RTS release we've seen in quite a while, the last major one being War, Inc., which was published by Handmark. MaW doesn't have a campaign feature, which might disappoint a few people. The game's design relies solely on the create-your-own-battle concept. In MaW's case, that means selecting your number of players, difficulty, landscape, climate, map size, population, and map display options. This is really an ideal approach to have for this type of game on the Pocket PC, as you can tailor the game to how long you feel like playing a particular battle: cranking up the map size, population, and difficulty will make things more involved, while throttling them back will make for a much simpler battle.

Isotope uses a lot of sprite graphics in their games, and in the case of MaW, this makes things a little hard to see. The actual "action area" of the screen is a bit small, largely due to the interface (more about this later). The units are also a bit small, and the fact that you're viewing them top-down makes them hard to see (and they must've been hard to draw, as well). The special effects, however, are excellent (as I would expect them to be, since Isotope 244 has used these effects in most of their games).  The most innovative graphic effect, however, is the dynamic terrain mapping, which leaves the scars of destruction on the landscape and also allows you to plow through trees and obstacles. This makes the environment much more interesting and dynamic than most RTS games, where the terrain is as unyielding as a rock.

Now about that interface. It's where the game stumbles a bit. Tapping and selecting units isn't any problem, but selecting and building units is a little dicey. One of the reasons the units are a bit small is likely because the map is limited to about 2/3rds of the screen. At the bottom left is a somewhat cramped, tabbed display where you select among engineering structures (bridges and so forth), buildings, and units. The menu looks a bit cramped, since immediately to the right of the menu is a fairly sizable radar map.

The slightly irritating thing about the unit menu is that some unit types can only be built after you've clicked on certain buildings. This takes up extra time. At the top right of the screen is a vertical list of buttons allowing you to bring up the menu, cancel moves, group units together, and so forth. However, there needs to be a cancel button near the unit menu since once you click on a unit or structure, the game will assume you want to build the structure unless you click the cancel button on the top right of the screen.

This is another quirk of the interface which just makes it take longer to get your structures up and your units created so you can go after the enemy. I think it would be better to have the radar map smaller, translucent, or perhaps available as a quick pop-up options available via one of the hardware buttons. That would allow the menus to be redesigned to incorporate more options and make them easier to use. Perhaps all available structures and units could be displayed across the bottom row to make buildings things quicker and easier. 

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Allen Gall's The Week in Games  Copyright © 2007 by Thaddeus Computing Inc.