ANCIENT SPACE MANUAL SERIES

We know who did this, long ago, and no one seems to have been able to quite manage to replicate that trick. This, then, is a shame, because it seems like the game had the opportunity to inject a bit of class into the genre. It's bizarre, in a world where there is so much incredible richness and variety of sci-fi literature, that it is so hard for that freshness to be picked up by games. The reality is far closer to the genre norm, however: embittered voice-over man, corporate/governmental interference, big bad, robot advisor, etc. The proposition, hell even the name, Ancient Space actually gripped me: a vision of a dark and distant space ruin, explored by intrepid folk in big functionalist starships. But nothing sticks, and it all sounds like filler. Yes, it's all dark matter this and funny named spaceships that, and I say that as a man who knows the name of far too many imaginary spaceships across a wealth of movies and videogames. That said, the initial feeling that this is going to be an interestingly atmospheric sort of game soon fades. It's beautifully presented, and instantly comprehensible to anyone who has laid their fingertips over the mouse and keyboard of a real-time strategy in the past ten years.

ANCIENT SPACE MANUAL SERIES

This means that the bulk of the action is to be had in the campaign, in which you build and blast your way through a series of tricky missions to unfold a story about something or other happening in space. So Ancient Space is this: it's a faux-3D real-time space strategy with a number of resource management vectors, a bit of resource gathering and building, and a severely limited skirmish mode. There's your three word summary.īut I can say more. That's not to say Ancient Space is a terrible game: it's actually not ever bad in any dramatic sense, it just doesn't do anything particularly exciting. The RTS meanwhile still pines for Homeworld, and while there are a number of games on our space-radar, nothing has yet to really spool up our jump drive and push into the next sector.Ĭould Ancient Space take up this critical astro-gauntlet? Space games are having something of a renaissance of late, but it's only in the fly-and-shoot genres that we're seeing much concrete promise (specifically with the rise and rise of Elite: Dangerous).

Ancient space manual