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Massive Assault - Easy to learn, fun to play, great game for beginners

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: July 22, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Massive Assault is a turn-based futuristic strategic warfare game waged on variety of scales; from skirmishes to global campaigns with a goal of total world domination. The player starts out as the armed forces commander of the "Free Nations Union", a global democratic government. The secretive and evil Phantom League already attempted to overthrow the Free Nation Union on Earth but failed. There are 6 deliciously rich space colonies where the "Phantom League" has used its malicious influence and intent on ousting the Free Nations Union and declaring totalitarian rule. It is a war of territory and strategy. You are the Free Nations only hope... and so begins the battles for truth, justice and the vending machine way.

Massive Assault was an exceptionally easy game to learn. I was expecting this to be a steep learning curve; not so! The game comes with a training camp option. Each "camp" is a different battlefield scenario and type. As the training battle unfolds, information prompts appear intuitively that describe what you're seeing and/or what you could or should be doing. The prompts include vital info on the combat pieces (movement, range, best use), specialized attacks or tactics, buying and placing reinforcements, strategy suggestions for various battlefield conditions and what buttons to push when. the one thing I love about this game is the UNDO and REWIND option. As the name says, you get to redo moves and attacks before the end of your turn. This is especially great when learning.

I applaud the designers for one of the best introduction learning programs I've seen in a strategy game. I strongly recommend all the training camps to get you into the action with great confidence. By the end of the training camps I was ready to lock and load and never had to refer to the book once - thank the war gods. (The manual is reasonably well written but the stamp size screen shots were worthless.)

Now to the meat and ammunition of the game. The combatants are primarily futuristic mechanized armor including light armor, tanks, heavy robo-armor, ranged weapons such as mortars and missile batteries and light weight bombers. There is also naval support and transports for amphibious invasions behind lines or to other islands. The graphics of the combat pieces and their fire power and damage are very cool. I get a real rush launching a missile battery and seeing the missiles arc with fire and smoke trails to the doomed target. Gets me jazzed every time. Sound tracks are great, realistic and add a lot to the enjoyment of the game. Thumbs up on combat effects and graphics.

The terrain is 3D with mountains and such which are a vary nice touch and can be important in playing out attack/defense strategy. The graphic quality is fair at best but considering this is not a program of domination and not warm fuzzies, it's livable. There are a variety of terrain types (roads, sand, snow, forests) and there are movement penalties but not as many as there should be. (Example driving on snow is same as open field.)

There is a good "intrigue factor" during the game. Of the 9-12 territories on most island battlefields, only 3-4 are known to be allies of yours (2 Disclosed by you to your enemy at the start and 2 to be disclosed during later turns, many times surprising your opponent). Usually you know 2 of the Phantom League's countries however you don't know which 2 countries are secretly allied with them until "disclosed". The rest are neutral territories. If the Free Nations invades a neutral country it automatically allies with the Phantom League and will raise guerrilla forces to fight your army. If the Phantom League invades a neutral country, the Free Nations Union then commands the new guerrilla forces as it allies with you. A territory is dominated when all opposing forces are eliminated and it's capital is captured. At that point you can start spending their revenue for reinforcements. I truly like the unpredictability of the secret ally system, it puts an edgy flavor to the play.

This game is quite dynamic in use of strategy. It also has a wide range of options concerning prompts, playability, effects that is quite impressive. There is an option for single player, internet play and "hot seat" play where two people can play at the same computer and take sides and turns. I haven't tried that yet but its in my future. Watch out Son, I know your evil plans. chuckle. of course the best thing about the game is that it is designed specifically for Mac operating systems and not a step child of a pc game. Hurray.

I did find a patch to the game though I had no trouble prior to the patch. But for reference here is the site and reasons for the patch to this game which was easy to download. Customer Support was very fast, accurate but a bit impersonal. thumbs up for support which can be found on the home site.

Massive Assault Patch: http://www.macgamefiles.com/detail.php?item=18560
Massive patch for Massive Assault
by Webmaster
* Networking code updated to latest PC code. Fixes many problems with network play
* Totally new rendering engine. Fixed many problems with first conversion model
* Texture reduction preference now works properly. Fixes many users with slow game response issues
* Optimized rendering engine to speed it up. Was doing a large number of unnecessary calculations. Vast speed improvement.
* Audio now played through OpenAL. Fixes stability issues, is faster, and supports some specialized hardware

It is exceptionally playable but could offer more difficult scenarios and better landscape graphics. I enjoy playing the game and am glad to have it. It has some very unique elements that set it apart from similar games such as 3D, free angle camera, secret allies and guerrilla elements. I would highly recommend it to young strategy players, beginners and intermediate players. Highly skilled players may find it a tad too easy to win after a while.

Don't Bother!!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 3
Date: July 24, 2005
Author: Amazon User

A major headache from beginning to end.

First, the lousy instructions for product registration require 2 codes that aren't clearly identified as to which is for the product and which is for network play, so you have to guess each time you get the very obscure error message about invalid codes.

Next, don't bother using the game unless you download and install the patch because it is so slow you can write your own software in between moves. Of course, once you do get to play the game at "normal" speeds, it will crash on you without warning (or any error message/logging for corrective action).

Finally, if their server is down, your game won't load at all, even if you only want to play it on your Mac and not the network.

This game was written by a bunch of amateur hackers that have no clue as to how to develop professional, user-friendly software. If you like that kind of product then go ahead and buy this; otherwise, avoid it like the plague.

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