"A failure of universal proportions."

Universal Combat is the worst computer game ever made, with Big Rigs following at a distant #2. That may or may not be an exaggeration, however I am at a loss to tell when I'm blinded by the sheer, mind boggling incompetence of it. Allow me to explain.

Universal Combat is broken. Seriously. The game is broken. As in, it doesn't work. The code is infected with a deadly strain of game programming ineptitude and it does not function as it should. The production values were outdated even when it first came out in 2004 and learning how to play requires studying on the scale of passing a college English class... If you didn't know how to speak English.

For instance, the interface is nearly impossible to understand, with dozens of onscreen symbols and commands that appear almost meaningless and you will suffer from trying to make sense of it all. There are exactly 130 game commands to memorize, not including the joystick controls... And yes, I counted. And yes, that is not a joke, that is the truth. I cannot fathom how long it would take for somebody to learn all of it, and learning it all is necessary to move around and interact with the game world. There are commands to do simple things like run and swim that shouldn't ever need special commands in the first place. I mean, Resident Evil has a run button, but it doesn't have 129 other commands to do even the most basic of movements.

There is no tutorial, no "warm up" mission, no opening cinematic, nothing at all to indicate what you are supposed to be doing at any given time. The game manual informs me that the apparent reason for this is to use your imagination with regards to how the mission is carried out, and that gamers used to the "hand-holding" of most other games "may find this method of approach intimidating".

My god. Are they serious? They cannot possibly be serious. They are basically telling you to shut up and figure it out on your own. I believe even the game's creators have no idea how to play their own game. This is the most ill-conceived and poorly executed game design I've ever seen. I'm guessing they were trying to innovate. I'll give them Kudos for thinking outside the box, but I also take those kudos back when the finished project is a miserable, steaming pile of expletives. Now you know why nobody has heard of this game.

Universal Combat claims to be the biggest combat simulator of all time. For one, that's probably false, and second, it doesn't matter one single bit because 99% of it is unplayable.

You can play as Land, Air, Sea or Space units. All of them control horribly and run into similar problems. The space simulator is probably the best and most stable part of the game, but that's not saying much. I started off as the commander of a star ship around Earth orbit, and the first thing I noticed was how terrible the Earth looked. The ocean looks like one single blue texture, there are no clouds and I can't remember if I saw continents. It's undoubtedly the cheapest looking graphic of Earth I've ever seen.

For some strange reason, 90% of visible space is covered with ridiculous, omnipresent nebula in varying shades of color. I guess I could understand opting for that instead of the pitch blackness and some stars you'd see in reality, but for a game that already has a laundry list of worse things about it, I have opted not to excuse it for this artistic blunder and will be included as yet another thing about it that sticks out like a sore thumb.

So after awkwardly moving around and sight seeing for a few minutes with the headache inducing controls, I decided I had enough of near Earth orbit and, after annoyingly consulting the dizzying manual, found the command to enter into Hyperspace. So I picked a target: I wanted to go to Neptune. So I initiated the Hyperdrive, and when I reached my destination, I found what appeared to be some sort of Stargate-like transportation device.

I thought, "Hmm.. Okay. So I have to go through this jump gate to get to Neptune. What's the point of the Hyperdrive then? Whatever". So I approached the jump gate, carefully, so I didn't accidentally hit a wall and blow up my ship. I entered the event horizon of the jump gate portal and... Nothing. At first I thought I arrived at my destination, but on closer inspection all I did was fly through the cheaply animated blue wormhole graphics and emerge out on the other side, in the same place where I was the whole time, still close to Earth.

Frustrated, I tried again. Maybe from the other side? Still no dice. I consulted the manual but found nothing helpful. I was stuck near Earth and I could not get to Neptune. All the while I got constant reports from my ship that intruders have boarded and my Marines were engaging the enemy. There were no enemy ships for as far as I could see. How the hell did they get in there? No explanation.

Finally fed up with all this bollocks, I decided to ram my ship into the jump gate and kill myself. To my bewilderment, I flew right through the walls and safely out the opposite side without a scratch. Not only is the Gameplay broken, but the collision detection is nonexistent as well. I would say that this game was programmed by an Octopus, but that would be an insult to Octopuses.

The only redeeming thing about this part was that it had some decently cool electronic music pulsing away in the background. This is not even close to a saving grace, because if all I wanted was to listen to some decent music, I would just take out the game and replace it with a CD.

Next, I decided to check out the first person shooter action. What I got was an incomprehensible error of coding that I cannot wrap my mind around. As soon as the scenario loaded, my Marine was staring at the ground. As I attempted to look up and around, his neck snapped back down towards the ground. I repeatedly tried gaining control of my Marines neck but the game would just not register my mouse commands. No matter how much I tried wrangling with my mouse, the game would bug out and not allow me to control which way I was looking, thus making it literally broken and unplayable. Eventually I found a really haphazard solution: holding down the scroll wheel enables "mouse look", so I could basically see in front of me now. The problem was, I could only face one direction and of course that isn't very helpful when poorly rendered enemy foot soldiers are charging at my defenseless avatar with blasters blazing.

Finally, I tried being a Navy pilot. I started off on an aircraft carrier in the ocean. I tried to take off and do cool navy pilot things, with the best of my knowledge of the controls. Instead, I went flying off the deck of the carrier and proceeded to sink to the bottom of the ocean in a fraction of a second. My ship displayed "Malfunction" warnings all over the place. Oh, thanks for telling me! This whole game is a bloody malfunction. My drowned aircraft then began to slowly float towards the surface, for reasons I cannot understand.

Notice how at no point during the above scenarios did I ever actually engage in "combat". The combat is certainly not as universal as the developers were hoping for. *Insert laugh track here* Oh, I did eventually find combat in the space simulator, but my short paragraph on this should inform you on how boring and unremarkable it is once you find it. It basically boils down to: point and shoot your lasers. Exciting, right? I couldn't figure out how to launch my missiles or nuclear weapons. Shameful, I know.

Perhaps there are patches available which fix all of these problems. But if I need to take the time to download patches in order to make the game playable, they have already failed in the most fundamental aspect.

I have yet to find any semblance of a story or a reason for doing anything in this game. That's not a bad thing, it works for certain kinds of games... Ya know, games like Tetris or Pac Man. However, their beauty is in the simplicity and elegant mechanics. Universal Combat is the antithesis of that philosophy. Horribly complicated game play and no reason to do anything, and the worst thing of all is that it's not even fun to do anything in the game. Tetris and Pac Man are ultimately pointless, but they are FUN. That's the critical word here.

Maybe there is a story. If there is, I cannot access it, because of the stupefying complexity of the interface and broken Gameplay. From what I can glean by the art work and minimal progress I have made, the game takes place in the year 3030, and humans and aliens are at war. For some reason... And different aliens are at war with other aliens. That's about all I can tell you. You can choose to play as a human or one of several completely unimaginative alien races that appear to have been picked out of the reject bin for B-grade Sci-Fi movie stories. They have taken the Star Trek invented cliche of rubber forehead aliens to the utmost extreme and ran with it until they finally keeled over and passed out due to heat exhaustion (or un-creativity, whichever one comes first). Every alien has the exact same body as a human, with the only difference being the color or features of their face. The Human body is the template and the only variable is what kind of amateur looking "alien" head you want to put on it. I can't think of a less inspired system.

The game has a whole host of other problems that irritate the sanity to no end. For example, there is no obvious exit command. In most games, pushing "Esc" on the keyboard is all you need to do to pause and exit the game. In Universal Combat, "Esc" has no function and you must consult the manual in order to find the completely senseless choice of "ALT+Q" in order to leave. It is absolutely diabolical that they insist on preventing the player from exiting the game quickly and easily. There is no excuse for this. It's like they specifically set out to create a bad game. I really hope that was their goal. Because then I could begin to understand why such a monstrosity like this even exists.

Compounding the problems even further are the horrible load times. They are quite long, and instead of at least something colorful or cool to look at, we get a solid black screen, with a continuous stream of "Loading xxx Script" in white text. The wait is most certainly not worth it, and if you even bothered to read up until this point, you hopefully understand why.

If anything, this is a shining example of what not to do when designing a good computer game for aspiring developers. Or it could be the ultimate guide on how to create a cheap, overweight, lazy and non-functioning game for use in trolling the gaming community. Your mileage may vary.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 02/09/10

Game Release: Universal Combat (US, 02/05/04)