Levels generally rely on the ebb and flow of base-building and exploration, with management of the game’s twin resources - electric power and Xenodium crystals – used to top up your armies with reinforcements and vital weapon upgrades. Stretching across a meaty 20 missions, there’s a rich variety of challenges to overcome - from full-on assaults to rescue operations and siege-style enemy invasions. Plus, in true StarCraft-style, you get to experience the story from the differing perspectives of three distinct factions - the gruff space marines of the Consortium, the insectoid Myriad, and the mechanoid Wardens. We’ll admit that the sci-fi trappings of Starfront’s invading aliens plot are hardly the stuff of the Battlestar Galactica reboot, but the generic sci-fi tropes do keep you pushing through the epic campaign. It all feels very natural, and while the basics of the finely-tuned controls are quick to get to grips with there’s still a lot to master over the course of the generous story. There’s a handy mini-map in the corner for keeping track of all your units, and flashing icons will zoom you quickly to areas where battles are raging off-screen. Selecting squads requires you to create boxes around them by sliding two fingertips across the screen and, once gathered, they can easily be assigned individual squad numbers to help you give quick orders later on. Yet after just a couple of missions into Starfront’s brief but beneficial tutorial, it’s clear the publisher has found a system that is both comfortable and responsive.Įverything, from ordering soldiers to upgrading bases, is handled by tapping directly on the unit and then either moving it with another tap or assigning an action using contextual menus at the side of the screen. Keyboard shortcuts and deft mouse clicks are the well worn tools of strategy gamers, so scepticism that they could be replicated on touchscreens is entirely healthy. Where Gameloft’s title most succeeds is in its intuitive controls. Yes, the game is Starcraft 2 by numbers, but - with Blizzard showing no interest in mobile gaming beyond Netbook-friendly graphics options - getting such a full-fat RTS experience on your Android is an astonishing achievement. If you’ve been anywhere near an RTS in the past year, you’ll immediately recognise the influences behind Gameloft’s Starfront: Collision.Played any PC strategy title in the last 20 years? If so, welcome aboard the good ship Starfront: Collision HD - where originality is in short supply but, for just a few quid, you still get a pocket warzone packed with shock and awe. It isn’t so much a gentle nod toward StarCraft II as a giant headbutt. Then again, if you’ve been anywhere near Pocket Gamer in the past you’ll know that we tend to turn a blind eye to Gameloft's copycat ways, so long as the game plays solidly. Luckily, Starfront: Collision does exactly this. If there was one thing to be said for the Android and iPhone editions, it’s that they made very good use of the touchscreen when implementing the strategy controls. This hasn’t changed in the Xperia Play version. You can select single units by tapping on them or select a group of units by dragging a box around them with two fingers. It’s intuitive and simple, and most of the time it works fine. The Play’s physical controls have also been introduced in this version, providing a few useful shortcuts. The L and R shoulder buttons select and de-select all units on screen respectively, which is incredibly useful when you can’t afford to obscure the view of a firefight with your own greasy mitts. The X button returns your camera to your HQ and the touchpads are used to pan the camera and zoom in and out. These controls, while helpful, just don’t seem as fluid, and you usually end up going back to using the touchscreen all the time. But this is actually more a credit to the surprisingly good touch controls than it is a flaw in the Play’s buttons. The controls aren’t the only surprisingly well-engineered thing about Starfront. The base-building mechanics are as good as any old skool RTS you’d find on the PC. It may not be quite as good as current-gen titles – with their expansive, blossoming tech-trees – but it's very well put together nonetheless. Limited resources are farmed from meteorite craters and energy podiums, with drone worker bots used to expand, increase efficiency, and build new factories, structures, and turrets. It’s standard RTS fare – again, no surprises – but it retains all the compulsiveness usually associated with the genre. The screen is also littered with plenty of useful icons (don’t worry - you can hide a lot of these). For instance, if you’re working on your base and your troops come under fire in another area, there's a dedicated on-screen button to zoom straight to that area.
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