Ancient Space is a real-time space strategy game, in the same vein as the Homeworld series of games that are focused primarily on its single player campaign. This is CreativeForge Games’ first game ever, with a second project successfully funded through Kickstarter. From what the trailers and store pages tell us about the game, this certainly looked like an ambitious project, featuring voice actors from Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek Enterprise and Firefly. So, did Ancient Space live up to its own ambitions?
Well, that’s what I am here to tell you about. Ancient Space has a heavy focus on story and exploration, so I’ll try to avoid mentioning the plot where I can, that way you can keep the surprise.
Astronomical requirements
From just the screenshots and videos, we all know that Ancient Space is obviously a good looking game, but such looks come at a fairly steep cost. The minimum requirements for this game are quite high, requiring a minimum of 4 GB of RAM. For those of us here who are used to playing simple looking and low hardware requirements games, such as 4X games, some requiring only 1 GB of RAM or even 256 MB of RAM – this might be outside your hardware power range. Graphics card and CPU requirements are similarly higher too, this is certainly not a game that you can expect to run well on most machines.
Now, before you say, “I’ll just go into the options and turn down the settings!” I have to show you something.
There aren’t many options to turn down. When you launch Ancient Space, you get a small launcher that lets you adjust the graphics settings, but again, there isn’t much variety in settings. Graphics quality is…just graphics quality. You can’t turn down shadows separately from textures, or anti-aliasing for that matter. It’s only the graphic settings that are like this, the audio settings let you control the volume of things like combat, environment and music independently of one another. I tried to turn the game down to low so I could get a better frame rate, but even then I still barely managed to get twenty frames a second. With such high requirements, that I couldn’t even play the game on the lowest settings, it looked like Ancient Space was going to get a very short review.
A New Hope
With no other choice, I went round to my brother’s house and borrowed his computer to try and play the game. Where my machine failed, his succeeded – the game was running smoothly on the highest settings. But then I noticed something a little odd in the rendered background of the main menu. There wasn’t any anti-aliasing, even on the highest settings. For a game with requirements so high and one that prides itself on looking beautiful, I found that rather strange. With the ability to play the game, I was able to start my review proper.
The game features a skirmish system, but it doesn’t feature a random map generator or anything like that. No, instead you’ve got three preset missions to choose from, and that’s it for the skirmish settings. There is no multiplayer either, showing just how focused the game is on the single-player campaign. The difficulty settings range from normal to super-hard and there is no easy setting, but there is a hardcore mode, which stops you from going back on any of your choices, like the Ironman modes found in both X-Com: Enemy Unknown and Europa Universalis 4.
As one would expect in this kind of game, the camera can be moved in any direction and units can move up and down in full 3D when maneuvering, there is certainly no “pizzabox” universe in Ancient Space. When on a mission, the game map is divided into a number of sectors, the only way between which is through wormholes; you can’t travel from one sector to another if there’s no wormhole in the way. This naturally creates a bottleneck, but in my opinion this is actually a good thing since it adds an extra layer of defensive thinking to the game, even if such strategies will never be used against a human opponent. Each sector is divided into a number of smaller groups that contain capture points, which we’ll get to later.
The Story
The story is told through pre-rendered cinematics and through the campaign, though there is plenty of lore in the officer selection screen for the player to read. I can’t go into much detail about the story, I don’t want to spoil the game for anyone who is capable of running the game and plans on buying it, especially since the campaign is the entire purpose of the game, but it’s definitely interesting!
The story is really where this game truly comes alive – without the developers having to work on things such as networking code or map designing for single player skirmishes, all their attention could be poured into the plot, and it shows. The story and the dialogue of the characters is well written and thought out, but is given to the player carefully so they don’t get lost in the setting, though there is plenty of information for a curious player to find in the background of most cinematics. Again, I will not go into much detail, but the developers certainly believed the game could stand up on the virtues of its single player campaign alone, and I definitely agree with them.
Combat – and the game in general – is very, very pretty
Units move smoothly from one place to another, turrets move around on the larger ships and the music and audio have had a lot of care put into them, with the music sounding reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica, and the featured voice actors really put their talents to good use. But I realized as I watched my tiny little bombers take on a large ship that battle chatter is completely nonexistent ingame. Your pilots carry out your orders in complete silence, not saying a word as you order them about, or when they’re moving in to attack. Instead, you simply get a voice over about units lost and the like, which I find rather sad. One of the many good things about Homeworld was hearing your pilots speak, not just when ordered but on their own. Something as simple as “Friendlies under fire, moving in.” did wonders for the universe, since in my opinion it made it feel more vibrant and alive. You weren’t ordering around automated ships, they had pilots who could talk, and even though they had admittedly little variety in dialogue, it still made things feel more real. And, in a game as story focused as this, making the universe feel real and alive is incredibly important.
When it comes to ship battles, things happen quickly, giving the player little time to make use of the active abilities on their ships and little time to bask in the beauty of the graphics engine at work. I actually had trouble taking the second screenshot since the battles ended so quickly I barely had time to get my camera in view of the action and by the time I took the screenshot the battle was almost over! Units have a number of active abilities and different formations that in turn affect the unit’s offensive and defensive values, so an offensive formation could, for example, increase all attack values by 25% but reduce defense to pay for it. It’s very easy to tell what a ship is strong against, the game shows you this information whenever you select the unit in the bottom right.
Combat feels to be well balanced, and the roles of units is made extremely obvious by the strength pips that tell you the unit’s speed, armor and attack power against the different ship types. Unfortunately, the population cap is quite low, so we only have a few ships to use and that’s made worse by the fact that larger ships can take more slots than their smaller counterparts. And a neat little after thought – whenever a ship explodes, it leaves a pile of purely cosmetic wreckage for the player to gawp at.
Economics and Technology
When it comes to economics, the player has two main resources, three if they count the population cap. The first resource, and the one that will be used the most, is energy. Unlike other RTS games where energy is generated by the player building reactors and the like, in Ancient Space the player gathers energy by setting up energy stations on top of capture points on the map – which reminds me of the way Relic Entertainment handled the excellent Dawn of War franchise of games.
Energy is used for pretty much everything, but you also have your second resource: Tritium, which is really just the standard fare and is gathered in the same manner as energy – by building tritium extraction stations on top of tritium clouds on the map. which makes more sense than being forced to build energy collectors on top of energy…deposits? I don’t know either. Energy is used for your normal units, tritium for the specialized ones, and you capture the points on the map by securing them with a small engineering ship called a Rover, which builds a little station there. Once that’s been done, you can then build things on to the station, such a a turret for example. Other than this…there is no base building.
Technology is as simple as going from tech levels one through four by pushing a button on the Ulysses carrier and clicking some units to upgrade them to higher versions – the rest you earn through the campaign…which I can’t tell you about.
Tactical map – Why isn’t this in more games?
One of the features that I liked the most as I was playing the game was the tactical map, a feature that should seem familiar to the anyone who played the Homeworld franchise of games. By hitting the tab key, you can bring up a special sector wide overlay that makes it possible to get your bearings on the battlefield in sections, and honestly, this feature should be in far more games than it has appeared in.
The tactical map shows the position of all objectives, your units, the position of all known enemy units and anything else of interest for the player, and it makes navigating the maps and keeping track of the situation a breeze. Seriously, this is a feature that should appear in a lot more games than it does, and I can’t but wonder why it doesn’t appear more often. After the player completes a mission, they are taken to the mission control screen where they can outfit their fleet with upgrades that affect the unit’s base stats, as well as being able to pick new officers. The officers, you see their portraits in the bottom left on most of the screenshots, have special abilities that you can use to turn the tide of battle across the entire sector, and have big profiles of lore for the player to read if they are interested. You also have the ability to outfit the player carrier, the Ulysses II, with different modules that affect its stats in the same manner that you can put upgrades on your regular vessels.
With all that in mind…
Ancient Space is certainly a good game and CreativeForge definitely deserve some applause for doing so well on their maiden release, but, and this is a big but, most of the gamers for this genre simply won’t have the computer power to run the game well enough for it to be played and enjoyed. And that’s a real shame as they’ve done a marvellous job creating a fun experience and a good, solid atmosphere. But, with hardware requirements so demanding, few will actually be able to see the universe the developers have made as it was intended to be seen, and the lack of multiplayer or any substantial skirmish functions whatsoever seriously hinder replayability.
In a game where exploration and mystery are the most important things, what is there to see after you complete the game once? But even if you only ever playthrough the game once, it’s certainly going to be a memorable experience.
The best way I can describe Ancient Space is more like a graphic novel, or cinematic game. The entire experience is in the plot and in the story, and everything else is just a vehicle to get that story to the player.
And in the end, there’s nothing really wrong with that. This is one of those games that, while few can actually play it, those who can will definitely find it fun to play.
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Space Sector score:
7.8/10
good
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The Good:
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The Bad:
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Chris Salt, otherwise known as CaekDaemon on Space Sector and on numerous other forums, has grown up around strategy games and has a seasonal taste in games, with genres coming and going like the weather, but a constant remains, his love of strategy games in all forms. He loves writing in all forms, reviews, books and the occasional forum game or AAR, and would love to write more reviews and previews and more for Space Sector.
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I’m sorry, 4 GB RAM is a high requirement? Wait.. what? I built my desktop ~7 years ago out of mostly salvaged parts from other computers and it runs 8 GB RAM. My laptop that I use mostly for work has 32 GB RAM. You can buy 4 GB RAM on Newegg for less cost than taking your significant other out to a movie (without dinner first). Am I way off base here?
Regardless, nice review, and I think I’ll pick this one up, thanks!
Don’t forget that other countries have different prices :p Things in Britain cost a hell of a lot these days. When you compare it to other games from the same genre, and the amount of content you have in game, I think it’s safe to say it’s high.
Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion, for example, has four gig as the recommend requirements rather than the minimum requirement, half that of Ancient Space even though the game has three factions, six if you count the rebel variants and a vast array of maps, units and so on. Add on a mod that adds even more factions while maintaining the original set of factions and you’re still not that close to eight gig, even when you’re playing the game with six full factions with completely unique units, sound and in most cases, play style.
Exactly my toughts during reading the reviews. 4GB is nothing, I never ever would call it as high requirements. And I’m from an eastern european country, with a 3 years old rig who never buys cutting edge videocards, CPUs etc…
One less item on the BAD side of the summary list.
Indeed I have 8gb, it’s not that expensive in the uk… in fact, cheap as chips.
Thanks for the review, as always very detailed and fair. I don’t think the requirements are too harsh to be honest. I will pick this up as i always love a game with a good story, i think a lot can be forgiven if the story is gripping.
4 gigs of ram. What year is your computer 2005? What serious gamer doesn’t at least have 16? C’mon now you need to have a PC to run all these games if you are going to review em!
Having over 8 gb on a normal desktop pc is pretty useless because it is not used by most softwares or games.
It is only useful for serious server machines or anything on a more industrial level.
Wait, what? Eight gig of RAM is useful in a variety of situations – especially on really big games made even larger with really big mods. The Caveman2Cosmos mod for Civilization 4, for example. Of course you need a 64 bit game to properly make use of the extra RAM, but these days you can find a very simple and easy to use file on the net that makes most games wide address aware – not quite what you need, but a step in the right direction if you’re still using a 32 bit OS.
This^^
“What serious gamer doesn’t at least have 16?”
Quoted for truth.
16gb is completely unnecessary, I have 16 and have never got near using 8gb. let alone 16.
Excellent review. Thank you!
I avoided this title because of the lukewarm reception by purchasers on Steam. It is good to see a different evaluation.
Question: do you think the low unit cap is the developer’s way of addressing the issue of higher system requirements? Sounds like a trade off to me.
Looks like teeny weeny tiny little really freaking small fonts.
So… no demo, no sale.
I’ve been done in by the tiny font/icon thing for the last time.
This game doesn’t look that much better than Haegemonia: Legion of Iron or Nexus the Jupiter Incident. The requirements seem a little high to me. It looks like something I’d enjoy and I’ll probably pick it up next year when I upgrade my mobo/cpu/ram.
“This game doesn’t look that much better than Haegemonia: Legion of Iron or Nexus the Jupiter Incident.”
My thoughts also. And Nexus’ recommended requirements included 256MB RAM. Does Ancient Space really offer 16x the graphics/gameplay to match the 16x usage?
The big problem though is the 64-bit OS requirement, given the less-than-sterling compatibility they have with older games and hardware. I’ll be sticking with XP for the forseeable future and giving this a miss.
Thats BS, I´m running on Win 7 64bit for years now, and got absolutly no problem with my old games. Nothing like a myth in regard of compatiblity.
How good is the AI in this game? That’s going to make or break the game.
Do you think that the modding community might be able to fix the ship slot problem? Going to be upgrading soon to 32GB of RAM on my PC, so the extra RAM requirements are not a huge issue.
I would disagree with this review on one thing. The high graphics limit is a good thing in that it means that the game will not be so out-dated graphics wise in a few years. A medium end graphics card like the AMD R9 290 or the GTX 970 should be able to run this game without issue it seems.
The big disappointment here is that the game does not visually look better here, despite the high requirements.
That and the unit count seems to be a huge issue.
Finally, another issue is the lack of a skirmish mode.
Any idea if this will be added in later patches or expansions?
Why would anybody need 32GB of RAM?
VMWare Workstation running multiple VMs, but that’s the only time I’ve ever needed more that 8GB.
Most professional applications.
Also experimenting with a RAMDisk.
The graphics issue is actually worse than it seems in the review, since I continued playing through the game after the review went to the editor. On my brother’s PC, the game dropped to around thirty to twenty frames on what I think was the fourth or fifth level, a sort of space prison break. And his PC is far better than what I have. He’s got sixteen gig o’ RAM, a i7-2600k and a 7970 HD GHZ edition graphics card with three gig of RAM on board.
And the game lagged really badly on that level, and started to lag during any heavy battles. I’ll ask Adam to amend the article, so no worries about that :D
As for modding, I can’t say I saw anything about that in game, but I wouldn’t expect much in that area either. AI is passable since most of the levels are scripted, not dynamic, but it doesn’t seem to make use of unit special abilities. I can’t tell if that’s because the enemy units don’t have special abilities (the player is always playing the same faction, even in the three skirmish missions) or if the AI is too dumb to do so.
As for Skirmish mode…nada, I’m afraid. I don’t think Ancient Space will be getting an expansion anytime soon, especially since it was made by a small developer who have already gone onto their next project. It’s best to assume this game will remain as-is. It’s a fine game…for one play through.
Chris, thanks for the reply.
Yeah it’s looking then like this game is going to be as-is then. Not much modding potential.
The only way then to get the game to be playable would be to have it in Crossfire or SLI (any idea if those are supported)?
A 290X would be around 30-40% faster than a 7970. Newer GPUs that might come out soon (Big Maxwell) might be worth looking at. They will be perhaps 40% faster than that, so maybe double the speed of a 7970.
But the problem is not the hardware then. The problem is the depth. There is no skirmish or sandbox mode, just the campaign, and not much modding potential. Plus only small scale battles. This sounds like something that may be worth getting when it’s 75% off, but not worth the full $20 to buy.
Hopefully games like Shallow Space have more to offer.
I wish space game devs would finish the game with near-zero art assets first and see if their baby is worth playing before putting on the coat of paint.
As we can see from SOTS 2, Ancient Space, Endless Space, X-Rebirth, Legion of Iron etc, bad gameplay makes the flashiest graphics meaningless. The Homeworld series were not applauded for its graphic (although art style was icing on a great cake) but how the game played.
I have absolutely no interest in devs that only ‘show off’ impressive visuals during the development cycle. What do they think they are, an animation studio or a gaming studio? Show me stuff that makes your game A GAME!
I’m in marketing and I know how visual is the quickest way to get eye balls but there are other ways to get your name out and at the end of the day, a pretty but shitty game will get canned in the first few days by every youtube/review channel/site and all those pretty graphics will be dead in the water.
I read some negative reviews that brought points you didn’t address.
1. The game apparently is in 3D space but you never move out of the flat 2D plane.
2. The AI is brain dead and just sends waves of units mindlessly into your heavily fortified and turreted killzone chokepoints.
3. Missions are structured in a way requiring you to know in advance what will happen. Like halfway through a mission a large enemy force will spawn on the opposite side of the map. If you didn’t know about that and kept your army on the front lines (as you’d normally do) you’d lose the mission right there. On harder difficulties you basically need to know the composition of enemy fleet so you can build ships to counter it perfectly. Otherwise you’ll get wiped out if you use all-around army.
Can anybody confirm/deny those points?
The first point doesn’t seem true. Ships do seem to move up and down on the plane, especially on maneuvers with fighters and the like. Larger ships seem to do the same thing too, but there does seem to be a range for the plane determined by the sector you are in. Some of the sectors are higher than others, some are lower, and they’ll have a range of movement for ships inside. Enough to avoid being called a pizza box universe, I’d say.
The AI does seem rather…derpy. It’s hard to tell exactly how they are acting since the game focuses entirely on the campaign where scripting levels and so on is a pretty common thing. And with how fast combat is, you can’t really tell if units are using their special abilities either.
As for missions…I wouldn’t say I needed to know what the enemy was doing in advance. I was figuring it out on the fly, and that seemed to work well enough to progress through the campaign without too much difficulty.
So glad you guys gave this one at least a guarded thumbs up. Some of the negative to lukewarm comments from players on Metacritic gave me pause, but after reading what you had to say about it, especially the strong story, I think Ancient Space is going on my short list. I love good storytelling in the context of an RTS (Homeworld, HW: Cataclysm, and of course the original StarCraft/Brood Wars come to mind as some of the better examples). You also seem to confirm my perception that the game is very moody and atmospheric, mysterious even.
BTW, a bit off topic, but speaking of space games, I’m really enjoying the recent Star Trek Online: Delta Rising expansion. Not only is it an excellent tribute to Star Trek: Voyager, but the gameplay changes for high-level players are very good as well. I would also add that although Voyager was never my favorite Trek show, Delta Rising is making me want to revisit it via Netflix.
LOL people getting all excited about RAM. If the game runs slow it’s also probably a CPU n Video Card issue,, not just amount of RAM. With that said was a good review. Biggest issue I see though is the replay value. Loved Homeworld but once the campaign was over it, it lost something. Real Time games also tend to lack a lot of real strategy. It’s usually build units asap and rush your opponent. Boom Boom Boom..
I’ve said for years that in most cases ‘RTS’ is something of a misnomer. Real time tactics would be a bit closer to the mark I think. Grand strategy RTS games like Distant Worlds and Europa Universalis, however, are much better representations of true real time strategy.
In any case there are a lot of abstractions in the average RTS game. I recall when I first played the original StarCraft I kept wondering why you would want to build a barracks and academy when you’re supposed to be presently evacuating. lol Coming off of true strategy games like Civ2, the idea seemed really weird to me.
@ACEofHeart: “If the game runs slow it’s also probably a CPU n Video Card issue,, not just amount of RAM.”
Coding and optimisation are critical – see http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/ for an example which saw framerates improve from 6 to 315 fps. On a Core i7 3930k with a GeForce GTX 680 and 32GB RAM…
I had far better experience from playing Star Wolves.
3D movement hardly matters here for me.
I believe the game would be better in plain 2D.
Camera, oh my camera.
Ok, it’s an RTS, so give me a full view of the battlefield.
What, a slight zoom-out with a blue color filter is your “full view”?!
Yeah, yeah, my bad, I should’ve gone for the story.
However, the gameplay (at least on initial stages) was too bland for me to do it.
Seriously.
Star Wolves. They’re old and cheap and on steam.
“Nothing like a myth in regard of compatiblity.”
Now let’s see:
Space Empires V runs poorly, flickers or freezes:
http://www.spaceempires.net/ftopic-7670-25.html
Baldur’s Gate 2 (disc version) won’t install:
http://www.rpgfan.com/boards/index.php?topic=7543.0
MDK (disc version) won’t install:
http://helphow.info/?qa=372765/mdk-on-windows-7-64-bit
Mechcommander 2 won’t run:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-gaming/problem-with-mechcommander-2-on-win7vista-64/b179eefe-9c21-411e-9562-70a5fa21fbfd
Sacred 2 crashes (fixable with some effort):
http://forum.sacred2.com/showthread.php?t=66686
Add to that list any game using a disk check like Starforce http://www.star-force.com/support/users/64bit/ or Tages http://www.overclock.net/t/572403/windows-7-pro-x64-tages-protection-driver and include those gaming peripherals that can’t be used since 64-bit requires new drivers.
Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback 2:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-hardware/windows-7-64-bit-is-unable-to-find-driver-for/37b56279-bd2c-4e0d-8397-4fcf8691a5f2