Interface and Sound

Familiar comfort

RTS games live and die by their interfaces. The game must give you ability to give a single scout detailed orders or maneuver a horde of 50 tanks through a narrow valley, trying to avoid ambush. Units must respond to the best of their ability - when you click a target for them to attack, they damn well better attack. Similarly, when you order them to cover positions, they should stop attacking, move, and then do the cover job - whether it's for a retreat or a convoy sneaking by.

Winding through valleys

Ack, trouble!

To accomplish that, commands must be easy to find, intuitive in their meaning and have appropriate keyboard shortcuts. The units have to respond adequately - meaning that the AI must react properly.

Not what we expected

So it was rather strange, after loading the game, to realize that I couldn't play it. The interface isn't bad; it just seems to do some things differently than you'd expect - like once you select a unit to attack ground, you can't just click again on the map and expect it to move. You have to select the move command, since re-clicking once it attacks ground just gives it the order to attack another spot of ground. E2150, camera controls aside, is really not that different from StarCraft or C&C. The camera itself felt quite unnecessary most of the time - the most comfortable position to play from is a slightly zoomed-out top-down view. This way you never lose a unit behind a mountain or cliff.

Combat

Your mission, should you choose to accept it

The menus, especially the tech tree and unit design window, take up the entire screen for no clear reason. There's nothing that you couldn't do in a popup. It's all done way too big - flash over function. When my poor LC hovers are fighting for their lives against ED tanks with their 105mm cannons, last thing I need to do is cover my battle map with a pretty unit design screen to get a new tank constructed.

There were some abysmally poor design decisions made about the interface as well. When you research, it of course costs money. However, when you're part of the LC, it doesn't come out of your main money pool. No, you have to have a specially allocated "research budget". Why? Why not just dip into my standard money pool, like games have been doing since... WarCraft. This is just a 'feature' that stands between me and the real game. The ED and UCS don't suffer from this problem, since all they have to do is build a research center. Even if it is designed as a game-balancing issue, there are better ways to do it than through menu-tedium.

Pretty planet

The landing field

Sennheiser Sound

Earth 2150's sound effects are plain-jane for today's games. Revel in the average sound of the average rocket being launched, and know that today's "average" is a lot better than average ever has been. The music and the effects are both professional quality, giving enough immersion value to keep all but the hardest critics in suspense. More importantly, the sounds are functional too, giving you warnings when necessary.

The voice acting is another matter. Whoever did the voices is quite good, but whoever placed them in the game isn't. Do you know many 15 year old girls with soft, delicate voices do you know who pilot tanks? Neither do we. For some reason though, that seems to be all the rage among lunar colonists.