On the face of it, AI War looks just like another galactic domination war game. However, do not be fooled (as I was). This independent title by Arcen Games is a very different animal to the conventional RTS (Real Time Strategy). I'm excited to tell you about all the features that set this game apart from the competition. Can these unusual traits make for a stunning game that every gamer must own? My admittedly low expectations were surpassed by light-years and although it has faults, this is one of the best space warfare games I've played.

The first uncharacteristic feature of this game is that the entire story is laid out for you on the main menu - you don't need to progress to the end of the game before you know what's happening. This is a really nice touch as, straight from the word go, there is some context to the large-scale space warfare. In summary, humans have been locked in civil war for decades although this is now over and the human race is united again. This unison did not come about by a peace though. The AIs - computer artificial intelligences - that ran each side's military production suddenly realised that this in-fighting is both pointless and extremely illogical. To end the fruitless bickering between the unpredictable humans, the cruel and calculating AIs joined forces to eradicate the entire human race. Facing a smarter, stronger, faster, emotionless cyber-machine the warring humans had no choice but to team up and face this seemingly unstoppable enemy as one united front.

That is truly breath-taking story. However, since everything is laid out so early on, it's also a tad depressing as you know there aren't going to be any brain teasing plot twists or story advancements appearing as you play through the game. As with so many of the radical departures from the norm, it's really down to the individual player whether this pre-gained backstory is beneficial to the game. In my opinion, some combination of the two approaches would have improved the experience providing some narrative flow and also adding to the game's longevity, keeping the player in suspense for what will come next. As an example, the hostile computer intelligence could realise its current domination tactics were not working and so switch to a battle for hearts and minds using propaganda machines and sabotage. How about the tricksy AI collective forging human-like Cyborgs, using these soldiers to attack a once peaceful alien race, framing the humans and locking them in a brutal two-way struggle? Granted those ideas are not the most original but my point is that there is plenty of unrealised potential for dramatic story elements while the war against the AI wages on.

The gameplay, again, is conventional on the surface yet with a mountain of twists and turns hiding in the gloom. Essentially, it's the same basic structure as all space-fans know. Starting with a base - a Command Station in this case - in orbit around a home planet, you construct other space stations, defensive or offensive structures, build fleets made of massive battle-cruisers and tiny fighters before sending these fleets off to attack enemy fleets. You can't just build millions of military ships though, as these cost resources and in this game there are four - Metal, Energy, Crystal and Knowledge. Leaving Knowledge for the moment (I'll get back to this odd statistic), resource management is far from the horror you may imagine.

The universe is divided up into a series of vast zones. Each zone represents the space around a planet and also contains a handful of resource deposits belonging to that planet. If you own a zone - you have set up a Command Station from a Colony ship near the planet within that zone - you can begin exploiting its natural resources. To do this you can make individual harvester ships and order each one off to mine a Crystal or Metal deposit - Energy generates automatically by constructing floating power stations. We live in the 21st century, however, and individually ordering ships to gather resources is terribly outdated. To speed things up, just hold the Ctrl key when you click the build harvester button. This automatically sends harvester ships to all resources of a certain type in that zone, minimising your workload. You'll still have to build turret platforms to defend the unarmed gatherers from attack - the fiendish AI has an annoying habit of gunning for these critical ships first - but its handily close to the 'fire and forget' style resource management should be. The other outstanding concept is that Crystal and Metal caches recharge themselves over time making supplies pretty much infinite - over gathering will slow production though. This means you won't be forced into an enemy held zone ill-prepared and out-gunned.

Knowledge on the other hand is a finite resource (yes, we all have to peak somewhere). This means that when your freshly built Science Lab ships have sucked up every ounce of intellectual brain juice a zone has to offer, you ain't getting any more until you move the Labs to a new one. Knowledge is used for researching new technologies to re-enforce your ships or bolster your fleet in some other way. There are a plethora of technologies for you to research: maybe force-fields for vulnerable harvesters take your fancy or Tachyon Emitters to reveal cloaked starships catches your eye. This is actually quite a revolutionary concept - usually the availability of a new upgrade to research comes along when you build enough structures or you reach a new experience level or some other major event. In AI War potentially every new technology is open for use at the start of the game, you just need enough Knowledge points to buy it. I prefer a more incremental approach to research with technologies unlocked with progress through the game so I don't think this 'all at once' feature works as a viable alternative. It just feels more real seeing new technologies springing up from time to time as if science geeks are busying about in the background developing better and more efficient devices. With a whole heap of goodies available from the beginning you really don't get that effect.

The highlight of the gameplay is definitely the enemy. Nearly all games on the market today use AI - the artificial brain behind computer controlled players - to mimic human behaviour so that all enemies behave as you'd expect. What if the computer actually played as a computer? A hostile force that was not affected by fear or doubt. There's a revolutionary idea and it's one that gives AI War its soul. Basically it means your enemy is smart - very smart on high difficulty levels - with an uncanny ability to multi-task. My favourite part of the war against a machine concept is that you can "anger" it by exploiting the fact that it is just a piece of electronic circuitry that must, at some level, respond to logic events such as true or false. The best way to annoy an unfeeling hostile intellect is to destroy the critical structures it creates. For example, if the hive mind builds a large Command Station in a zone and then you blow the vessel to kingdom-come with a massive mixed fleet of bombers, missile craft and battle-ready starships, Mr. Computer is forced to take action. The AI sends millions of nasty things to your location which will probably end up destroying your deadly armada but at least you've made progress towards the final goal. We'll win this war yet men!

However, a computer has no eyes - it must gather data with sensors. Destroy these sensors and the computer is effectively blind. Each AI held zone has a sensor block - a massive grey coloured slab-like Data Center - and taking this out before or after attacking the main base lowers the AI's anger level. It's still going to know something bad just happened though it's reaction will be a lot less severe, giving you a better chance of keeping your shiny army of flying destruction.

Another great feature is the requirement for strategic play - you can't just rush into every situation with as many shooty things as possible. Building larges fleets and conquering zones willy-nilly will just anger the AI making it retaliate with its own massive fleet, causing a swift and brutal defeat for the human race. Instead you should target those of vital importance for the enemy - the ones with lots of ship-building spaceports or planets in critical locations between zones are high-priority targets. That said, you do need to claim zones to get more Knowledge for access to more technologies and better chances of survival. This trade-off between all out war and target priority is excellent and really gets your brain engaged.

Each ship type has its own limit to restrict how many can be built - there is not one giant army limit as in other strategy games. This means you have to decide wisely which ship to send into which situation. You cannot just produce thousands of your most powerful ships and forget about the weaker ones - everyone plays their part in the war to end all wars. For example, you could take all the biggest most deadly star cruisers out to attack the enemy leaving the weaker ones behind to defend the base. What if a big AI battleship suddenly appears in your home zone? Your weaker ships just won't do enough damage and having sent all your heavy cruisers far out of range, defeat is immanent. Choosing where certain types of troops are most effective is very realistic - I don't think a war has ever been fought throughout history where these tough decisions weren't absolutely crucial to victory.

As you can probably tell, I'm loosing the battle of keeping this review a plain and simple overview of the game without getting bogged down with details. To be fair, it is a biblically hard skirmish to win as the level of detail in this game is truly astronomical. There are so many individual unconventional features that I could analyse in detail. There's wormhole scouting, ion-smashing, resource-stealing, gate-raiding and thousands of other exciting terms waiting to be mentioned. However, most of these things are fairly advanced manoeuvres that I couldn't sensibly explain. AI War has a huge learning curve and try as you might you're not going to scale that mountain in a hurry - this is a very slow game to get into and enjoy to its fullest. Of course, the step-by-step tutorials to cover the basic tasks are a godsend - don't even think of attempting a full campaign without completing them. I wish the game would pick up the pace at times though. To achieve this and still leave a satisfying game experience a lot of the finer details that make this game what it is would have to go. It's a trade-off that must haunt many a game developer.

Other than this initial slowness, there are a few problems to highlight. Firstly, the zones around planets are far too big. I know that space is an incomprehensibly vast place and the game does provide a mini-map to aid navigation but it's remarkably easy to loose your rather small ships. Massive fleets are easily found, it's individual ships such as floating Science Labs or puny Engineer drones that are a devil to track down, especially when on the move. There's a problem in having these very large fleets and I really do mean large as an average one consists of around three hundred ships! Squadrons of this magnitude make it exceedingly difficult to select just one ship. Luckily, the times you need to do this are quite rare but they do happen. As an example you begin a campaign with very little information about the outside galaxy. To get some valuable intel about enemy positions and so on you are required to send out scout ships to explore zones beyond wormholes (the little spiny vortex objects that link zones together). By building a single scout for each wormhole in a zone, you'll quickly end up with lots of them but no easy way to send one to one wormhole and one to another.

The ships do standout from the background, with the zones looking considerably space-like, filled with stars and blurred by the occasional enormous clouds of space-dust floating by. The single giant planets in zones are a bit too similar although there are a few welcome twists such as rocky spheres that have exploded from the inside, crumpling half the planet and sending debris into its atmosphere. The ships themselves are not so good looking. They are detailed and colourful but appear awfully flat as if they have been cut out and stuck on. It's a real shame as they do not fit in with the beautiful space backgrounds at all.

The music is truly amazing given the heroic story. It cycles through a long list of tunes that all convey a sad but resolute feeling as if you are fighting overwhelming odds but will never surrender, mimicking man's struggle against the much more powerful AI. When it comes to sound effects, the quality drops a tiny bit. The game is filled with battle sounds as missiles are set loose and laser equipped ships burn away chunks of the opposition. They are all adequate for the action they just don't really inspire you as much as the music. Still it's a very minor issue in a very big haystack of quality.

This game has heaps of longevity if you get hooked. The single-player game is played in campaigns made up of a series of planet holding zones. Campaigns end when either the humans or the AI lose all their Command Stations and this can take many hours, especially on larger galaxies that have more than 80 planets. You'll never run out of stuff you haven't seen before either as, in addition to there being hundreds of different ship types to build and technologies to research, each campaign is generated at random giving a whopping 16 billion possible play scenarios! Couple that with the fact that campaigns can be played co-operatively with up to 7 other players and you have enough content to keep budding space-commanders pleased for months. It may seem a disappointment that there is no competitive multiplayer pitting two human foes against each other although this game mode would ruin the 'unite or die' story so I'm actually really glad they left it out. Lots of games just pile on as many multiplayer modes as possible in the hope of high praise without thinking about how it effects the rest of the game so kudos to Arcen Games for not falling into the same trap.

As a final note, the game actually did not play at all on my middle-range laptop. Luckily, I also have a lower spec desktop PC which the game installed and ran perfectly on proving the low system requirements are accurate. Looking on the official game forums there are posts from a couple of people experiencing similar problems getting the game to work properly. I advise you try the demo to ensure things do actually work before purchasing the full game.

Hopefully, you can tell just how content-packed this game is by the length of this review - I haven't even gone into that much detail! All that intricate detail including resource management, scouting, ion-smashing, gate-raiding and deep strategy does make it difficult for rookies to the space warfare genre to really get into the game. There are some minor problems; the graphics are debateable and the size of the game means you can often loose track of what's happening. On the other hand, if you love realistic, complex and thorough space-based real time strategies, purchase this game right now as it is an aspiring space commander's dream. With all its unconventional features such as the insanely large fleets and the ingenious new take on AI, the chance of other games like this coming in the near future (or before artificial computer minds take over the world) is slim indeed.

Reviewed by Tom Clark for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).