Aeon Command Review

Aeon Command is a 2D strategy/resource management game where you have to overpower the enemy at the other end of the map. All maps are the same length, but the position of your mothership can differ - though it doesn’t often.

Touted by the developer as a tug-of-war strategy game, as you play you certainly get that sense. Your ships can be taking parsecs but an influx of enemy ships will destroy them and push the battlefield closer to your mothership. The first few missions were quite tense for me, especially when I retried the same map four times and got overwhelmed very easily every time. But then I discovered something that wasn’t mentioned in the barebones tutorial.

You can upgrade your fleet between missions. This is on the main menu, so you actually have to come out of the mission select to do it - which is how I missed it. Once I began utilising upgrades, battles became much easier. And the more I played, the more I realised I didn’t have to use a varying strategy or really many of my six attack ships at all.

Every mission is the same: do some small objective and then destroy the enemy mothership. Either collect energy or resources, which are used for your abilities and shipbuilding respectively, or sometimes survive for a set period of time. Then just spam ships until they manage to blow up the enemy mothership. My strategy literally became: gather as many resources as possible, wait for the last possible moment before enemy ships reach me, then spam the 3 key which releases the third type of ship. Three times out of five that worked across the 20 missions I attempted it on. The other two, I required the toughest ship - the strategy was the same but adding an occasional 6 or 7 key, sending out the sixth and seventh type of ships.

That’s where Aeon Command falls apart as a strategy game - the strategy bit. Once you’ve worked out your own strategy, it will probably work on most missions. There are three factions to play as - Alliance, Cyborg, Exiles, and each of them plays basically the same. Effort has gone into making the ships different, with looks and weapons, for each faction but it wasn’t enough to alter my strategy. Each faction gives you three very different powers, such as a ring of repair or a wall of fire, but each one still factored into my strategy the same ways.

There are other modes, however, that will require you to think a little and get some more value over the 3-4 hour campaign mode. Skirmish mode has you set out against an AI, which is more to gather upgrade points for the campaign mode though the difficulty can be changed. You can set it to random, giving you an assortment of ships and powers from all three factions, which does give it a little more of a need for strategy. The other mode is multiplayer, but every time I loaded the game up there was nobody to play against.

The graphics are fine, seeing as this is a 2D game and won’t tax your graphics card. It only requires 100MB of hard drive space and has a minimum spec of Windows XP. I did have one gripe in that the explosions looked odd - when each one happens there is a very obvious (to me) square around it. When the three explosions happen on each destroyed mothership, it results in three large squares. Sound-wise I enjoyed the music and sound effects in matches - the tone made when you click anything in the main menu, however, was grating.

One final note, as a father of kids who constantly require urgent attention, I was annoyed to find that simply hitting Escape does not pause the game. It brings up a menu to allow you to pause, go into settings, etc. Once you click pause, you can hit Escape and the game remains paused. Having to do two things to pause the match is very clunky and annoying.

Aeon Command is also available on iOS and Android, which are a much better fit for this as a casual game. As far as ports go (it came out early last year on mobile), it is quite nice and as I said the soundtrack is quite good for only six tracks. If this sort of game is for you, then by all means purchase from the Bat Country Games website - then you also get the soundtrack. But if you’re looking for something to test your grey matter, then perhaps look elsewhere.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBRPUzHSavo