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ARES RISING by ... Maurice Fitzgerald |
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With these two beautiful sims just hitting the market I think Imagine Studios has made a mistake placing Ares on the market at the same time. Not only do the graphics in this game fall short in immersing the gamer but there is really little originality to make this game stick with you.
The storyline follows you as the main character, a space mercenary named Marlowe, down on your luck with nowhere to turn. Finally making a contact in the suspicious character Helena, you’re offered both a home (which she reminds you can be just as quickly taken away as given) and a steady source of income. You desperately need both, so you accept and are placed in the rather precarious position of carrying out missions for one Radivic Karedescu, ruler of the IPEC. He somewhat seems to be modeled after fictional OPEC chiefs, but with an even more heinous goal.
There has been a discovery of an alien artifiact called an Omicron Device, a source of power unseen before in the galaxy. The precarious question is: do you help Karedescu recover the artifact for his nefarious ends or do you go against him and protect the sovereignty of the galaxy? Your first assignment upon reaching your asteroid home is to complete two training missions called Competency Threshold Runs, or CTR’s. These are two very basic and easy missions that have you flying through a series of gates in a flight proving ground much the same as the X-Wing training missions. You will also do some basic gunnery against both unarmed and armed targets. Once completed you will begin your storyline mission tree. Each mission is quite unique and the game doesn’t become boring. The missions are a combination of scripted and randomly generated missions, which is a nice way to keep the game from becoming stale. Here Imagine has done very well to keep the gamer from becoming complacent in flying his missions. But where the missions succeed the graphics fail miserably. Needs More Than a Facelift
Although the screen shots would have you believing otherwise, the graphics here are way below par for 1998. Possibly I’ve become jaded after looking at beautifully rendered sims such as I-War and WC Prophecy and even the latest Descent:Freespace, which was quite a shocker to me. But Ares is more than a step back in time in the graphics department: it's like the ugly sister no one wants to talk about. Perhaps the E! Channel could do a fashion makeover because this one has a serious Fashion Emergency! The cockpit is very static, and not in the least as dynamic and involving as WC Prophecy’s or any of the others for that matter. It’s actually the only space sim in which I ALWAYS turned off the cockpit- it was that much of an eyesore and served little purpose. In most similar sims I keep the cockpit onscreen (personal preference) in keeping with the ‘spirit of the game’. But with Ares I always turn it off. Gamers expect higher end graphics nowadays and to not supply them is selling your own game short. While the ships look nice, the supporting graphics are not up to par. 2D Sprites Galore Planets are 2D sprites missing that nice ozone layer aura around them, replaced instead with a drab purplish colored perimeter that looks more like a poorly drawn border than atmospheric cover. Space dust is the same and the only truly beautiful rendering is of the nebulae, which is something straight out of any of the other major league space sims on the market. |
Space flight is dark, as it is supposed to be, but almost to the point of distracting you, forcing you to rely solely on your weapons instruments to track and ID a target. No chance of visuals or of the typical WWII dogfighting we have become accustomed to in space sims without difficulty in seeing your targets. Weapons fire is done in similar 2D sprites and is not the least bit exciting, leaving the gamer to feel less than thrilled with the game. I’ve since found out the graphics libraries used for Ares were from Charybdis and their pitiful M1 armor sim, so that explains the graphics quality or lack thereof. In the sound department there’s not much here either, and the music is reminiscent of the early WC games. As a result, the game lacks immersion, save for the storyline and the pretty decent AI.
AI Done Well Your enemy and wingmen AI are both rather well done, which could be foundation on which Imagine can build for their future releases (they plan this to be a 3 part series). Hopefully they can learn from their mistakes on the first attempt and capitalize on the positives in the succeeding attempts.
Space flight can be done within either of two modes: arcade or inertial. In inertial mode you’re supposedly flying in “true” spaceflight form. This inertial mode reminds me of the early arcade game Lunar Lander and is not very realistic nor as flexible as flight in Independence War. The arcade mode is the one space simmers are most used to and know best, and is done in much the same way but still seems to be very sluggish. I felt like I was piloting the space shuttle and not a fighter most of the time, not having any real feel for being in a high tech space faring vessel. The game does come with multiplayer capabilities, which I've been unable to test at this time. Imagine is currently trying to get this sim supported on online gaming networks so online opponents will be easier to find. For now you are limited to finding a player on your own through the Ares players forum at aresrising.com. One of the greatest things that Imagine did with Ares is that your multiplayer characters are constant and continue to grow with each multiplayer battle. This is a great idea and is something I'd like to see from other game companies. I had high hopes for Ares, possibly too high. There were comparisons to the old game Elite, which every space simmer loved back in that day, as well as to Privateer. Open ended games are a much needed and sorely missed style of play and I’d hoped that Ares would fill the gap. I could even overlook dated graphics if the gameplay and enjoyment factor was high. But Ares hasn’t really done any of that for me, which is a shame. Let’s hope that Imagine gets right back on the horse and does it better next time, building on their good AI foundation and to bring us a much better sim next time around. COMBATSIM RATING:73 Core Rating : 70
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