While the former gets points for being one of Blizzard's best loved titles before World of WarCraft, the latter being one of the first RTS games to truly exploit the notion of 3D space and the tactical considerations it brought. It created a gold standard for what space combat should be like, and it's never been properly duplicated, sequel and expansion notwithstanding. Some might be bold and point to Digital Anvil and their only RTS Conquest: Frontier Wars as a cult classic that got overlooked in the noise of Chris Roberts' maladroit exit from the gaming industry so many years ago. Gamers have, for many years, been looking for something which captures the feel of Homeworld while advancing the genre. Sad to say, Ancient Space is not that advancement.
The game does not fail on its artistic merits, be they audio or visual. The models ship models used are very nicely detailed. The character portraits for the various NPC characters that you pick up along the way are decent, though not ground breaking from a technical perspective or eye catching from an aesthetic perspective. There are plenty of little details and visual touches which were nifty in and of themselves. The soundtrack is passable but not really compelling. Voice acting is pretty good, probably even a cut above the soundtrack in terms of performance quality. Overall, a respectable enough effort for the artists, voice actors, and musicians.
Where the game fails, and does so fatally, is in the gameplay itself. The developers at CreativeForge seem to have mistaken complexity for depth. Everything about this game is so completely byzantine that it just makes you want to find the scuttling charges.
For a game that is notionally set in deep space, you have remarkably limited freedom of movement, mainly because the levels are not large tracts of empty void with interesting stellar phenomena laying about. Instead, they are basically large space dungeons with certain areas that you have to capture and put small stations on. In this respect, the game borrows heavily from Conquest: Frontier Wars, but turns what could have been a tense multi-area RTS into a joyless slog.
Unit pathing is at best wildly erratic. Saving early and often makes things a little less of a grind. At the same time, when it seems like your units can't get out of the way of each other fast enough and suddenly become punch drunk through their own brief contact, it kills the minuscule amount of fun you might have managed to build up to this point. More often than not, the maps recreate all of the frustration of one of Homeworld's signature missions without any of the joy or satisfaction to match it. There doesn't seem to be any sort of rhyme or reason for what units can successfully damage or destroy outside of vaguely defined size categories. There's no unit veterancy mechanic, no units are conserved after the current map is completed, just bog standard unit allotment based on what the developers tell you you need and an “upgrade” button that may or may not be available depending on the map conditions which you have no control over. Add to this a pair of large capital ships that both have to be protected or it's mission failure, and you realize that this just didn't get thought through carefully.
The storyline for the game shares an almost equal degree of failure. Part of the gameplay involves recruiting NPCs to help your fleet, but there doesn't appear to be any personality to them. Again, the mechanic echoes the Fleet admirals one could recruit in Conquest, but throws dozens of them at you. It feels almost as if they tried to pair the crew building of Mass Effect with the variety of creatures in Pokemon, with laughable results. It's really a shame, because several of the character bios themselves are really nicely written, but as help in the game, they've got all the distinctiveness of cardboard. There's no help to suggest what NPC crew members would be useful or not for a given mission, which leaves you basically running with the same starting crew members while you try to brute force your way through the game.
As for the story itself, there's nothing that makes it even vaguely interesting. You have a trite storyline about a lost expedition and a bunch of space pirates and none of it engages the player at all, despite being beaten over the head with it through both pre-rendered and in-game cutscenes. It lacks any sort of nuance and leaves no room for connection with the characters on an emotional level. It's just there to give the missions a thin veneer of cohesion and it doesn't even do that right.
There's no denying that Ancient Space looks really neat. It hints at the glories of space RTS games of the past, but fails to learn from them, demonstrating that cool visuals are not enough to keep bad story and needlessly complex gameplay from being on the wrong side of history.
- Axel Cushing
The Good:
- Nice visual style
- Decent voice acting
The Bad:
- Overly complex gameplay
- No real story or character development
- Borrows elements of other games and makes a hash of them
