Project Earth: Starmageddon

If there’s one thing you can definitely give credit for in Project Earth, it’s the artwork. The game is damn gorgeous when everything is set to high detail, offering some of the most photo realistic space battles you’ve seen in a computer game, with ships, weapons and particle effects to die for. The game itself is a full 3D real-time strategy game set in deep space. You do most of the things that come to mind in a typical real-time strategy game, like mining for resources, moving troops around, and going through the campaigns of two very different races.

The one thing that sets Project Earth apart from the herd of similar RTS titles is the freedom of movement on all three axes. But while you can easily mistake this for a fleet-level tactical space wargame (like Nexus), it’s really more about throwing more ships of superior build at the enemy than he can throw back at you. There are no formations, no intricate subsystems to target, no careful maneuvering or flanking – just build more, target the right ships and you’ll win the day. Even with this inherent simplicity, the space battles still look appropriately epic.

Another twist is here is you can manage parallel battleplanes. As in Conquest: Frontier Wars, you can jump between small sections of space via wormholes and have battles happen simultaneously. This is more of a complex juggling act than it has to be, since you can’t really shift your full attention at two places at once. But by far the one major problem with the game is the one-save feature yet get the at the end of the game. Saving is almost universally implemented in real-time strategy games, so why it was left out here is anyone’s guess. It does make the game more annoying, naturally.