If you fancy a more relaxed setting, there’s always the option of playing locally with a friend, or skirmishing with the AI.Īll in all, Starfront is a thorough and entertaining game. Of course, if you crack on through the pain barrier you might one day become one of the indestructible maniacs that kept Starfront: Collision's multiplayer from being any fun when you first set out, so don't give up too soon. Some may enjoy the steep learning curve, but for others it'll take the fun out of the game. The rest just stood idly by.Īnd if you want to play multiplayer, prepare to have your enthusiasm crushed by players much harder, better, faster, and stronger than you. At one point we told all units to traverse a dangerous canyon, at which point only the two most vulnerable and important units moved, and were subsequently killed. Occasionally the AI will refuse do what you tell it to. There are few other dings in this otherwise shiny teapot, too. The storyline of StarCraft wasn't particularly original in the first place, so why should we expect Gameloft’s knock-off to be any better?
For instance, if you’re working on your base and your troops come under fire in another area, there's a dedicated on-screen button to zoom straight to that area. The screen is also littered with plenty of useful icons (don’t worry - you can hide a lot of these). It’s standard RTS fare – again, no surprises – but it retains all the compulsiveness usually associated with the genre. Limited resources are farmed from meteorite craters and energy podiums, with drone worker bots used to expand, increase efficiency, and build new factories, structures, and turrets. It may not be quite as good as current-gen titles – with their expansive, blossoming tech-trees – but it's very well put together nonetheless. The base-building mechanics are as good as any old skool RTS you’d find on the PC. The controls aren’t the only surprisingly well-engineered thing about Starfront. But this is actually more a credit to the surprisingly good touch controls than it is a flaw in the Play’s buttons. These controls, while helpful, just don’t seem as fluid, and you usually end up going back to using the touchscreen all the time. The X button returns your camera to your HQ and the touchpads are used to pan the camera and zoom in and out. The L and R shoulder buttons select and de-select all units on screen respectively, which is incredibly useful when you can’t afford to obscure the view of a firefight with your own greasy mitts. The Play’s physical controls have also been introduced in this version, providing a few useful shortcuts. It’s intuitive and simple, and most of the time it works fine. You can select single units by tapping on them or select a group of units by dragging a box around them with two fingers. This hasn’t changed in the Xperia Play version.
If there was one thing to be said for the Android and iPhone editions, it’s that they made very good use of the touchscreen when implementing the strategy controls. Luckily, Starfront: Collision does exactly this. Then again, if you’ve been anywhere near Pocket Gamer in the past you’ll know that we tend to turn a blind eye to Gameloft's copycat ways, so long as the game plays solidly. It isn’t so much a gentle nod toward StarCraft II as a giant headbutt. If you’ve been anywhere near an RTS in the past year, you’ll immediately recognise the influences behind Gameloft’s Starfront: Collision.
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