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Review

Duration: 34:50

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9

I'm playing Kaiser Earth, a strategy game by Evil Mountain. The game charges you with protecting the Earth from alien attack by building a ship and engaging hostile foes. Allowing more peaceful immigrants to land on Earth can produce bonuses and result in re-election, while undertaking missions more favorable for a particular company will result in more ship parts during construction. Ship design consists of placing parts on a grid; most components can increase or decrease the effects of adjacent items, so careful design is important. Weapons, shields, armor, engines, and boosters are all available and have a range of semi-randomly generated attributes like hit points, ramming power, fire velocity, and reload time. Ship components lost during battle must be replaced, so maintaining good relations with the corporations by completing missions is desirable. The battles themselves take place in real-time, but you issue commands while paused. You can specify which direction weapons fire, shield orientation, and the trajectory of your ship (a cumbersome, inexact method), or you can set items to automatically engage nearby enemies. The battles are satisfying, especially when a well-crafted ship design proves effective during combat. The battle AI isn't the best: finding enemy ships that are moving seemingly at random can be difficult, as there is no organization in their attack patterns. Still, the modular ship design of Kaiser Earth, coupled with action-filled battles and the campaign decisions, makes it an agreeable strategy title.