Pros: Fun to see the Net from the inside
Cons: Disgusting graphics
Graphics: definitely not eye-candy
Sound: Music is pretty good, but SFX are a series of bleeps and blops
Control: Takes some practice, but does the job well.
The Net Revealed...
As a race of beings, we often dream of the impossible only to have those dreams come true as generations pass and we develop culturally and technologically. Often it happens within just a couple of generations. We dreamt that we would someday fly; and now we do. We dreamt that our future selves might one day break the sound barrier. It happened.
There are so many things to dream of and so many of these dreams have become a reality, but what about Artificial Intelligence? Is it just a dream? Have we come far enough to create sentient machines? Not yet, but soon.
AI Wars is the game that takes you into a world of networked systems, systems that are aware, systems that are all wired together. The Net, but not as you know it. Dream the impossible because AI has indeed come alive in AI Wars: The Awakening.
AI Wars offers a unique gaming genre. It does not fall under the first person shooter category, but rather is best described as a first person adventure or in as it reads in the manual, "a first-person 3D real-time action/strategy hybrid". There are not many games out on the market today that focus on traversing the Internet via 'an agent', "an expert program designed mainly to collect and distribute data over The Net".
Basically, your goal is to explore the Net, find information, distribute this information, and doing so conquer the Net. Before starting the game, you have the option of either taking complete control of the Net, becoming sentient, and/or reaching immortality. You get to decide which of the tasks you want to accomplish, and at what level of difficulty.
Lost on the Net...
AI Wars is the type of game that you play, become lost within its world for a few hours, and then like a dust cloud settling, everything falls in place and you finally begin to understand what the game is all about. Seriously, the learning curve for this game seems a little steep. Even after reading the manual, I had no idea where to go, nor any idea of what I was supposed to accomplish. I just kept walking through a series of doors and going down a series of elevators and hoped for the best. I was doing this for three hours!
Playing the tutorial first is essential. It teaches you how to decrypt data, management and the collection of information, how to buy and upgrade software, sell secrets, and hack into a system for passwords (within AI Wars). Without playing the tutorial you will be pretty much lost within the game's Net.
Eye Candy? NO!
I'm sorry to say, but graphically speaking, AI Wars falls short. Bearable, but there's just not the same spark of interest that Red Alert 2 or Final Fantasy 8 (for the PC) attract. If I were to rate the graphics on a scale of 1-10, (1 being disgusting and 10 being gorgeous) I would rate this game a low grade of 3 or 4. Even though the graphics are terrible, it doesn't mean that that game is not any fun. In fact, there's quite the gameplay, something I began to appreciate once I was used to the controls and the handling of the gizmos and gadgets your avatar is equipped with.
Gameplay = Fun
Quite a while back I did a preview on this game and I really displayed quite the distaste. It didn't show me anything innovative and contained nothing that lit my spark. In other words, I was bored out of my mind playing the demo because I did not know what in the world to do. Now, having had the chance to go through a tutorial, which was available in the 1.05 patch released later, I had a better idea of what do. Yeah, I still got lost, but at least when I was lost this time, I was having fun. Don't purchase the game if you're anticipating amazing graphics. Purchase it because you want the gameplay value, the 'fun' in the game.
La La La ...Oh Wow, the Music is Great!
Personally, I take a liking to Techno music. Even though the beats are very repetitive, there is always one chorus part that really keeps the adrenaline going. Getting lost wasn't so bad because I got to listen to some great music; however, when compared to today's Techno music, there really isn't any competition for modernization. This was a great ingredient that the developers added to change a rotten stew into a semi-good one.
Do you Believe in Evolution?
Back in the day, I remember playing games on the old 386s and 486 PC systems, with the sound effects and graphics that were great at the time. The music was pretty good too! But when you have orchestrated music and live voice editing in today's games, those bleeps and blops and bogey graphics, the kind still used in AI Wars just don't cut it. However, it's understandable that the developers may have wanted to use these bleeps and blops because, for them, that's how they saw the Net.
The Final Judgement...
Overall, the game lacks in graphics and in sound effects, but where they fall short the gameplay itself picks up. So there is an equilibrium between 'disgusting' and 'great' which puts the game at a mediocre level. This game could have been far better if the developers had taken their time to refurbish the little things that make a game great.