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Value
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| | Genre: Strategy & War | | | Min OS X: 10.5.8 |
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The missions, on the other hand, aren't really that bad given what the game has to work with. You've got the requisite capture missions, defense missions, survival missions, and so on, which is a fair amount of variety. The missions really would be entertaining if the core gameplay was more engaging. The maps themselves tend to get rather large as you near the end of the game, however, which tends to lead to hours and hours of drudging slowly forward as your armada clearly outmatches your opposition. If the battles were over quicker, if technology was more of a long-term effort (preferably with tradeoffs), the missions would be over in a reasonable time frame and feel more like a real-time experience.On the graphics end, the game looks great (barring the briefing models). The spaceships glow under the light of their engines, the camera gets hit by lens flare all the time, the blasts get absorbed by pulsing shields, and everything explodes very satisfyingly. The interface is also rather good-looking, with plenty of animated buttons to go around. This really does seem like where most of the love and care went, to be honest, as the other elements of the game are rather weak by comparison. The audio is no exception. You have a low variety in music, the sounds are passable but not excellent, and the voice acting would have been best left out entirely. (If it had led to better models for the briefing humanoids, definitely!) Still, you'll be hard-put to find an area of audio that isn't at least covered. All the buttons, ships, warps, and cutscenes have their slots nicely filled with an appropriate sound. It just isn't as high-quality as the art. So, would you want to buy Gemini Wars? If you like casual strategy games, sure. It's slow-paced and not very difficult, so it's good for a quick play on occasion. You won't be able to finish any of the later missions without at least an hour spent, of course, but it's a relaxing game overall. If you prefer more of the fast-paced or cerebral strategy games, however, this shouldn't be on your purchase list. Pros: • Plenty of eye-candy
• More relaxing than most games in the genre Cons: • Lackluster research tree
• Very slow gameplay
• Missions drag on unnecessarily Franklin Pride is a game development graduate and professional programmer/consultant for the Unity development engine. He's currently working on completing his first two computer games (The Farming Game, Uncle Fred's Deep Space Security) while consulting on the side.
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