The Tomorrow War
PC DVD & digital download
Developer: CrioLand
Publisher: 1C Company
Game website: http://www.1cpublishing.eu/game/the-tomorrow-war/overview
Overview
Space, the final frontier….
Oops I should stop right there, this isn’t a Star Trek game, I’ve been going through a serious Trek phase since watching the new film (which is great!) and I will be doing a separate blog post on Trek games! Anyway back to the review:
The Tomorrow War is a space sim/action game based on a trilogy of novels by Russian author Alexander Zorich. This fact in itself is somewhat puzzling as 1C are obviously using this as PR for the game, but I cannot actually find the novels, which leads me to believe that the books have not been translated into English (although I could be wrong on this!)
The basic premise is that it’s the 27th century and mankind has colonised the galaxy. The United Nations protects Earth and one half of the galaxy, but one of the colonies called Concordia has become very powerful and has colonised 30 of the other planets. So the scene is set and inevitably war erupts between the UN and Concordia.
There are basically two sections to the gameplay and I will detail them separately as they do differ in quality. Firstly there are the sections of the game where the player is on a carrier or base in between missions. The player can access various areas of the ship or base via a menu in the top right and they can click on various characters to initiate the dialogue between characters and to start things like mission briefings. You are Andrew Rumey and you start as a cadet pilot on a UN carrier. The between mission sections are reminiscent of games such as Wing Commander or Conflict Freespace and set the scene for the storyline and mission progression.
The second section of the gameplay, which is really the “meat” of The Tomorrow War are the actual missions, where the player controls a variety of fighters, bombers and transports in a wide variety of missions, both in space and in a planet’s atmosphere. One very impressive aspect of this title is the seamless transition between space and planetside without any loading or pausing as such. CrioLand have a very powerful game engine here and I will be very interested to see what they do with it in the future. With the space gameplay, the player can set the game to either arcade style, which gives you a Wing Commander style flight model, or simulation which gives you a more realistic ride with things like Newtonian physics etc. If you’ve played any of the popular space sim/action games that have been released in the last 10 years then this is all familiar, welcoming territory. The Tomorrow War does have some very nice features that I haven’t really seen in other games of this genre such as the fully 3d cockpit that you can look around and the ability to padlock a target, which are features that you more commonly find in a flight sim. All the other usual stuff is here to play with; a variety of main guns and missiles, various autopilot modes such as fly to target, dock, form up etc. The first few missions are essentially training sorties, but it’s a nice surprise that you do not have the usual (and clichéd I might add) “fly through the hoops” style training missions which every other space sim seems to have. In fact the first few missions get you right into the action and even have you navigating through the asteroid rings of Saturn, complete with loads of rocks to smash your ships. There are no bitmap image cheats of the rings, you get the real deal here!
The Good Stuff
Overall, the space sections of the game are quite enjoyable and the combat is quite absorbing. The game is very linear in terms of mission progression in that you simply just go from one mission to the next, but the mission objectives are quite varied and you do get a nice feeling of being involved in something grander in terms of the background of the war. The other plus point of the game is that it’s not too demanding in terms of PC hardware and managed to run quite well on my midrange machine with all the bells and whistles turned on. Admittedly the graphics are not exactly state of the art, but they do the job and I always say it’s better to have a game that runs well than a game that looks beautiful but is a slide show on anything that mere mortals can afford in terms of a P.C rig!
The Bad Stuff
There are three main areas of this game that I will now have good old gripe about that unfortunately prevents this game from being great.
I will start with the worst of bunch and that’s the subject of bugs. I have played many games on P.C (without naming names here) that were released in an atrocious state and to be fair this is not really that bad, but there is a kind of bug that really gets me and that’s gameplay bugs. In The Tomorrow War, one of the later missions has you going through a gate to another area of the galaxy and you immediately appear on the event horizon of a black hole, which is fine (I like a bit of excitement and challenge in my games). However, you soon discover that no matter what you try to do, your ship gets sucked into the black hole and you die, game over. I must have tried this mission about a dozen times before I saw a post on the forum for the game that said you had to change the game settings from sim to arcade to be able to escape the black hole and achieve your objective. This in my opinion is very slack for a modern game and should have been fixed before release. Another issue (which has gotten people’s backs out, for obvious reasons) on the forums is the in mission communication. While you are on a mission, periodically a video screen drops down in the cockpit and you see an image of somebody that is obviously trying to communicate with you (maybe giving mission updates or orders etc), but there is no accompanying speech or subtitles, so you have absolutely no idea what the person is saying to you. I suspect that this is meant to give you clues about what you are supposed to do as I quite often found myself scratching my head during a mission.
The second gripe that I have with this game is the in-between mission sections where the storyline is conveyed to the player via character based cutscenes. I do not have a problem with this game principle and it has worked quite well in other games of this genre, but the execution in The Tomorrow War is so poor, that I really wish they had not bothered and maybe spent more time on the good bits of the game (i.e. the actual missions). The character models and sets are O.K in these sections, but the animation and voice acting is pretty abysmal and quite frankly are not up to the standard that you expect for a 21st century PC game. Your character “Andrew Rumey”, who is supposed to be the hero of the piece and the saviour of mankind, sounds more like a northern sports centre manager than a hotshot space pilot from the 27th century! (come on Crioland and 1C, you can do better than this!)
My final gripe is more of a whinge of disappointment than a full on gripe. This game could have been much better and held a lot of promise, but the final product leaves you feeling slightly disappointed with the whole affair. As I mentioned earlier, the game is very linear and this would be fine, but the game teases you with what could be. For example the missions and environments seem very big in scope and you get to fly from space and land on planets in some of the missions, but you never really get the opportunity to just explore, which is real shame because of the wonderful game engine. In one of the missions, you have to fly down to a planets surface and land at a base to deliver something, but then that’s it – you just take off again! It feels like the developer had a much grander original vision for The Tomorrow War, but this became lost somewhere along the line during initial development. I can’t help feeling that CrioLand should have gone more down the Elite route of game design for this one and had more of a freeform space trading style than simply a linear shooter, oh well. A real shame and a lost opportunity…
Conclusion
The Tomorrow War is ultimately a brave attempt at a genre that quite frankly has died a bit and needs new life. Ultimately the game is a disappointment. Not just because of what you really want the game to be, but because of the poor state that the title has been released in for the western market (I do wonder if the original Russian release is better in this respect?). If Crioland fix the major problems with a patch, and you can accept the game for what it is, it’s a fun space based action game, but it is not (unfortunately) the next Elite, or Freelancer even. For me, I will shelve the game until a patch is released. There is good gaming to be had with this title, but unfortunately you have to wade through the poor stuff and issues to get to that goodness….
Score: 7 out 10
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