We love the title. It speaks volumes about the classic sci-fi concepts on offer here. And they have to be, because beneath the premise of alien robots battling for universal supremacy, using Earth as their theatre, pumps the heart of a deeply complex and involving RTS. The game’s 25 or so campaign missions will see you attempting to conquer Earth in the shoes of four different factions. The Novus; a race of vengeful machines, who travel the universe looking for places to do battle with The Hierarchy; your common or garden planet-rapers that move through the cosmos harvesting resources until the planet is kaput. Then there’s us humans, and finally, the Masari; a kind of ancient druidic race who’ve always dwelled beneath the oceans of Earth.

Stylistically, this game is fantastic. The Novus especially, fitting snugly somewhere between Transformers and The Borg - their deep, droning voices carrying the game’s narrative with dramatic sci-fi punch. The levels and objectives are suitably different from mission to mission and work hard to avoid falling too easily into the established RTS convention of ‘build massive army and storm the whole map’. But where some may find this to be a strength, we found it to be ever-so-slightly irritating, especially during the first few missions in which we felt that our hands were held far too much. And by making each campaign a small chapter in a wider narrative, it’s difficult not to feel that freedom to form your own strategies is little more than smoke and mirrors.

And then there’s the visuals. Varying between mildly impressive and wildly shit, RTS games in general feature massive numbers of units on-screen as a graphics-killing rock for their back. Universe At War not only grates on a visual level far too often, but anything more than 60 or so units on-screen and the game slows down to around five frames per second. And that’s no exaggeration, boys and girls. Whether or not you can ignore its visual rancor and inexcusable technical issues to find the refined RTS underneath is something that only you can decide.

Dan Howdle