All Aspect Warfare Review [PC]

Military sims are in vogue at the moment, aren’t they? ArmA II came out a few months back, Operation Flashpoint 2 will be hitting store shelves in the space of a few weeks and a little game called All Aspect Warfare hit the internet a little while ago.All Aspect Warfare is hardcore. Oddly, when playing it so soon after the others, one comparison came into mind almost immediately: if the others are Strike Commander, then this is Falcon 4.0. Hyperbole, certainly, but not without reason.All Aspect Warfare (AAW) is 3000AD’s latest. It takes the Battlecruiser 3000AD universe, puts you into the boots of a special forces infantryman, and plonks you and your squad down onto a planet. The plot runs along the lines that the four of you have crash-landed on LV-115, a planet currently held by humanity’s bitter enemies, the Gammulans. Being all alone on a hostile planet is bad enough, but it gets worse: prior to crash-landing, a planet-killing weapon on your ship was activated. If you don’t either get off the planet, or find it and disarm it – both of which will naturally involve encounters with the Gammulans – then it really is all over. Fortunately, you’ve got the weapons and the knowledge to see it through, whether you fancy jetpacking onto a building and sniping, or running in close with a shotgun, or dogfighting in an aircraft, or hitting sand dunes in a buggy.Being that this is by the same developers as the Battlecruiser series, it’s perhaps not a surprise that the first comparison I thought of was flight simulators, and there are some striking similarities with AAW. First off: the manual. These days, more often than not, a manual is a flimsy little paper booklet with a vague description of the controls, a paragraph of plot, and usually works out to be a convenient place to put a CD key. Conversely, AAWs manual is absolutely essential if you want any degree of success with the game. While you can probably pick up the basics if you’ve played a first-person shooter (or, funnily enough, a flight sim) you will need the manual to make the most of the options available to you, or to understand half of the acronyms thrown your way. Without reading the manual – or, preferably, printing it out and referring to it regularly for your first few hours of play – you’re going to die within 60 seconds of starting a mission, because AAW is, at times, punishingly hard. You’re always outnumbered, frequently outgunned, and knowing exactly what you can do and how to do it is pretty much essential to surviving even the most rudimentary encounter.The second similarity, oddly, is mentioned above: the controls are strikingly reminiscent of several older flight sims. Whether you’re in a vehicle or on foot, you’ve got a radar that can switch between different types of tracking (troops, things on the ground, things in the air, etc.) and the ability to cycle through targets by tapping keys. Not something common to most first-person shooters, which don’t tend to have any form of automatic targeting, but something that regularly pops up in flight-based games. The more arcadey ones, at least.And then there’s the third similarity, which is the actual flight. As you’d expect from any sort of military sim, there are aircraft, and you can pilot them. As you’d also expect if you’re aware that the same company made the Battlecruiser games, there’s a pretty damn detailed flight model. The flight is a major aspect of the game with plenty of missions involving it in some way, shape, or form, and again, reading the manual and familiarity with the controls are both essential. Without knowing how to flick on your jammers at a moment’s notice and then bank to avoid incoming missiles, or how to speedily order your teammates to do something, or the specific capabilities of your armaments, you’re going to be in big, big trouble. Dogfights are tense and exciting, and the sci-fi fighters tend to act as you’d expect a sci-fi fighter to do so. Glorious.Balancing out the air sorties is the infantry combat, which doesn’t fare as well as the fantastic flight. Much as you’re in a gigantic open-world environment, it’s incredibly bare. While there are sprawling canyons and mountain ranges, there are normally sparse amounts of cover. The same is true of bases which, as with the rest of the world, aren’t pokey little walled-in areas but gigantic layouts filled with buildings, vehicles, and defences, but without much in the way of incidental terrain. The enemy AI on the ground is variable, too. While they’re seemingly incapable of using cover, usually preferring to charge to an effective distance and open fire, you can fool them in surprising ways: jetpacking onto a building, moving out of sight, and slipping around behind them is a ploy that – for once – actually works. It’s a tad mixed, but the variety of weapons and equipment and the team controls mean that you’ve normally got a variety of different strategies available to you at any one time. These strategies extend further into the overarching game, too. There are generally a variety of different ways to finish any given mission based on how you prefer to play, rather than guiding you by the hand.{PAGE TITLE=All Aspect Warfare Review Page 2}The thing about AAW is this: it’s very clearly aimed at a very select group of people. There are plenty of complaints I can make – there’s the occasionally disappointing ground AI, the high-res but bland graphics, the slightly wonky physics and collisions, the fact that it’s got a steep learning curve and maximum enjoyment requires you to get very au fait with the occasionally esoteric controls – but, honestly, these aren’t the sort of complaints likely to matter if you’re actually in the target audience. If you want an in-depth military-strategy title which gives you a vast range of options and will brutally kill you over and over again if you’re not careful, and you have the patience and tolerance to learn how to play and aren’t turned off by indie aesthetics, you’re going to adore this.That’s not to say that there aren’t valid complaints that can be made. With the steep learning curve, it’d be nice to see a better tutorial than the short one given in the manual that requires you to flick between the game and the in-game documents regularly. While the controls aren’t a problem once you get used to them, there’s still a weird feeling for quite awhile that you’re not doing things quite right, and not making the most of what’s available to you. It passes, but a bit more hand-holding to talk you through some of the strategies and possibilities would, I suspect, help. This is thankfully mitigated somewhat by the excellent video tutorials available if you have a couple of hours to spare which will help you get into the game’s unique flow a lot more easily, but there’s still the argument that an in-game tutorial could ease players in more gently and potentially widen the game’s appeal.This problem actually extends to the campaign missions, too. It’s occasionally unclear quite what you’re meant to be doing, which is likely intentional due to their freeform nature, but it’s somewhat galling to see a yellow target marker in the horizon and not be entirely sure what you’re meant to be doing, instead relying on suggestions from your AI teammates – which you may well miss due to the text-only conversations. Much as you can go back and check the logs to see the conversations that have gone on, you’re still left wondering whether you’re doing what you’re supposed to be every now and then.Finally, there’s dying. Death comes quickly in AAW, and from time to time it’s unclear as to what killed you; unless I’ve missed something major there’s a significant lack of feedback when dying. If you’re in the air and the missile alert beep has been going for a few seconds, then yes, it’s obvious, but if you’re on the ground and suddenly the game cuts to a shot of your corpse, it can be a wee bit confusing.Problems, certainly, but tolerable, because I’ve not really played anything quite like this. It’s maybe most telling that I spent three hours last night repeating one Instant Action scenario, trying out different strategies each time and dying regularly, and yet I enjoyed every single minute I was playing with different weapons, or attempting a daring run in a vehicle, or having my AI squadmates focus on one particularly troublesome target. (It’s also probably tells you that I’m still pretty bad at the game.)Which inexorably leads us to the score, which is utterly meaningless in this context. Bluntly put: if you want a game which will kill you regularly, which will force you to think and plan, and which will force you to learn the often confusing ways it works – but is incredibly rewarding when you pull things off and when you really start getting the hang of it – you will absolutely love this. On the other hand, if the extent of your tactical planning is hiding behind cover when being shot at in Modern Warfare, you are going to absolutely loathe the intricate controls and often ludicrous difficulty. If, after reading all of these complaints, your heart is still palpitating at the thought of leading a squad of four deep into enemy territory, wreaking havoc, and escaping, then there’s a very good chance you’re going to thoroughly enjoy your time with AAW.By all means, try the demo, but be prepared to spend a few hours with it to really get a sense of how things work. Personally speaking, I’ve enjoyed it. I fully expect most people to hate it, or to be turned off by the controls, the design, or the difficulty. So, yes, try it for yourself if you’ve got the patience to keep going after the first few times you die. You just might be missing out.