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.