I don’t often review things – but this game got my attention so much I thought it was worth mentioning in better detail. Even then I haven’t explored every last detail of the game, but there’s enough to give someone the bigger picture.
Normally I would be quick to point out that “x copied y”, or at least heavily drew from y’s ideas. You can clearly see that Gameloft – the creators or Starfront, were at least heavily inspired by Starcraft. When I saw the name of the game, and the screenshots, I thought it was a rip-off of Starcraft. But then the game stuck to my mind – is it worth the £5? Are they going to get the controls right for a touch device?
The answer to both of those is a clear YES. When you play it too, it doesn’t feel too much like Starcraft either, despite the glaring similarities. Both have three major races – humans – the all-rounders, a very alien-looking bug-type race – the “build fast, hit fast” approach, and the highly advanced, powerful race – in this case a robotic race.
Campaign? Check!
Starfront comes with a rather varied campaign mode. Missions take you to various scenarios, and require more than just “destroy the enemy base”. You certainly do a bit of base building, and tech-tree climbing, but some missions – particularly mission 8, require some quirky tactics, or ways of progressing. Mission 11 resembles a tower-defence style map, where you build as many turrets as you can to stop waves of enemies getting through a canyon. Mission 10 sees you defending a huge insect as it walks across the map getting tired and stopping for breaks whilst enemies try to attack it. another mission sees you in a central base, holding off waves of enemies with your desperate few units until an evac fleet arrives.
Annoyingly though, what seems to happen with strategy games which in any way involve humans, is that the human side ends up spending half the time battling other human factions. Starcraft was rank with it. Starfront has some of it. Either way it is getting tiring. Hope would have it that, if we become advanced enough to explode the galaxy in such a free-form way, that we would not do it just to set up a rogue faction hell bent on dominating other humans. Either way, for goodness sake, stop telling the same cliche story because it has been done to death, and it’s not going to teach us any more morales on that.
One mission in the game dwarfs the others in terms of difficulty – the apparently dreaded mission 8, which is the final human mission. If you don’t do the ‘easy completion’ tactic, then you will retry again and again, in frustration to the sheer number of problems this mission faces. Either your computer ally won’t actually build anything, or the enemy will change attack strategy, or your computer ally will take over your expansion resources and not actually use them, or the enemy will devastate you will seemingly unlimited cloaked units and conveniently placed air units. As a hint, you can complete this mission with a large pack of ground-firing helicopters, circling the outskirts of the map until you can fly south, from the top centre…
Multiplayer & skirmish
Multiplayer seems to suffer from the problem of players rushing other players, ending the match before anyone can actually get into it. If you are expecting to play against a human player who also wishes to spent at least 15 minutes sending vast armies and tactical knowledge against you, think again. People seem to prefer rushing in with the first unit that happens to walk out their barracks, and giving you grief before you have time to sigh.
Skirmish however, is ridiculously easy. The AI more or less sits there waiting to get annihilated. On anything other than the toughest difficulty, they will send a worker or two towards your base. On the hardest mode, you get a few basic attack units, and a cluster of them sitting in their own base. If there is one area that drastically needs improvement, it is the skirmish AI. Surely someone at Gameloft is adventurous enough to sit and tinker with the AI enough so that it can do more than represent a very rushed feature of the game? Here’s hoping.
Conclusion
In all, it is nice to play a game on the iPad that is more than just the same level again and again (Zombie gunship), or a puzzle game with little story that gets boring quickly (Angry birds, Cut the Rope, loads of others…). The iPad doesn’t seem to enjoy much in the way of in-depth games, or ones that attempt to be more, but suffer some serious gameplay mechanic bugs (Red Alert).
Gameloft, although they are obviously HUGELY inspired by the more serious games out there, at least they are taking the iPad serious enough to give their versions of big-hit games a serious try. People are moaning that they are curiously similar to certain games in a very obvious way, but at least it means the iPad is getting some approach to decent games which the bigger game studios don’t seem interested in exploring. I am watching Gameloft from now on, because their energy for games development is impressive, and the titles they are releasing are very adventurous in a space where others seem reluctant to fully explore.
As for Starfront? I cannot say I have returned to an iPad game after a few days playing, other than Fieldrunners. At long last, a game I can really get in to.