I don’t know what the online mode is like (I hardly ever play online, as already established), but the solo mission is awfully short. It’s more of a tech demo, obviously, for the interface and voice controls of the game, and — wow, it’s impressive.
During the voice calibration I thought the system had to be cheating, but voice command just works (I shouldn’t be so surprised; computers have had this for a while now, and recognizing a known, limited set of words is pretty simple with the computing power of current systems) and it made me want to try my Mac’s speech recognition again.
I’m not going to get into detailed analysis of the game, or its controls, because I don’t grok strategy games, and the mission was so short anyway, but I can tell there’s one thing quite wrong with the interface, and it’s a shame they would waste such an innovative technology this way: you need to memorize all available commands.
It would be trivial to display a menu when you start voicing a command (as the game does when you press the right-hand trigger), then display submenus as you work through menu items, but that’s not allowed: submenus are only shown after you’ve finished your command “sentence,” so that… you can see what options you missed. It’s certainly not going to hamper serious users, who will quickly memorize the limited set of options, but it’s a very stupid mistake that I don’t quite understand.
Anyway… the game’s mood is quite competently grim and depressing (the release’s timing couldn’t be more in/appropriate, actually), the graphics are adequate, and I still think it looks too simple for real RTS fans, but a good primer for console gamers.
Couldn’t be bothered to change my xbox’s language settings to see what it’s like in French (assuming the demo does speak French).
![[4/5]](http://static.garoo.net/_img/20090828/stars/4.png){kind=small}
