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Review: Military Madness: Nectaris | PSNStores

Review: Military Madness: Nectaris

Posted by on November 20th, 2009 | 0 Comments | Tags:

Developer: Backbone Entertainment
Release Date: November 05th, 2009
Price: $9.99
Demo: Yes
Players: 1-4 (Local and Online)

What I liked:

  • There is a lot of single player content (32 levels and local play with bots)
  • Custom Soundtrack Support
  • The ability to turn of battle animations and speed up movement.
  • The added customizations in multiplayer due to the Commander Unit.

What I disliked:

  • The game has a pretty steep difficulty curve.
  • No way to change the camera view other than zooming in.
  • Some of the game controls.
  • No real tutorial, there is a manual but something “in-game” would help.

It has been a long time since I played a turn-based strategy game. So having this game turn up on PSN was quite a breath of fresh air. This was my first venture into the series, having never owned a Turbografx-16. It didn’t take me long to figure out what I needed to do.

This being my first time playing the series I went straight to Campaign mode. There was a brief introduction to the story — moon colony, war, blah blah — and after that is finished you are thrown into your first map. I figured I was going to have to sit through some lengthy tutorial explaining the game mechanics, but that was not the case. So I opened up the options and read through the manual.

I was progressing my way through, clearing the maps as they come, but then around Map 5 I hit a wall. The game when from moderately easy to controller-throwingly hard. It wasn’t helping that I would occasionally not attack after I move my units because I though the cursor was on the enemy when it wasn’t. I also wish that I could have been able to circle the camera around the map to get a better view of what is going on.

It isn’t all bad news though, the multiplayer is excellent. I just wish more people were on playing it. In the few online matches I did find, everything worked great. Voice chat was clear (although I wish it wasn’t push to talk) and there was no lag. The added customization of your Commander unit makes multiplayer a lot more fun. And of course if you have friends, you can also battle it out locally. But even if you don’t you can always play against the computer.

So I would have to say, if you want a challenging game to burn some time on, this one fits the bill. With 32 maps to play in the Campaign and possibly endless rounds with bots you will definitely get what you are paying for. I just wish I a few little things were tweaked to make it a tad less frustrating.