Aegis of Earth – Protonovus Assault (PS Vita)
Language Audio: English
Language Subs: English
Developer: Acquire
Publisher: Aksys Games (NA) / PQube (EU)
Format: PS Vita/PS3/PS4
Type: RTS/TD
Demo Box: PS Vita
Synopsis:As natural resources dwindle and gargantuan monsters begin to attack civilisation, mankind retreats behind the walls of their city strongholds, bolstering defenses and developing new weapons to repel the constant attacks. As commander, you must take command of your rookie crew, and defend the city against the monster threat. Using an innovative rotational district mechanic, you are able to change the arrangement of the city to best prepare for the counterattack. Command the last bastion of humanity in the fight for survival!
So I’ve been waiting for this game for a while and finally had a chance to sit down to play it. The question as always is, was it worth buying? The short answer: YES. The long answer is YES, but with some issues.
Before I begin I must stress that the issues I’ve encountered are (as far as I can see) PS Vita only issues. So they can be avoided by buying the PS4 version, which I wish I’d picked up.
So lets go!!
If like me, you read the Destructoid review for this game you’d probably have gone in with low expectations. Hopefully, you’re also like me and ended up feeling the Destruction reviewer was an idiot and didn’t understand the game properly.
Now, although the game is being sold as an RTS I don’t really see it that way, if anything I’d say it’s more of a Tower Defence game. If you go in expecting an RTS you’ll probably be a little disappointed, but if you go in expecting a TD, you should be okay.
Unlike normal TD’s however, such as Defence Grid, you aren’t making a path for the monsters and blasting them as they meander their way to you. Rather you’re in control of a city, the city is based on rings which revolve and your guns and missiles move to face the enemy.
It’s a novel, and different approach to Tower Defence, and I found it worked. I would be lying in bed saying ‘one last battle’ to myself only to find the hours slipping by. So for me that alone says that Acquire made a great game!
So the formula they went for is TD in it’s simplest form, you spend resources to set out your weapons. You do the battle, gather left over resources, rinse and repeat. Which admittedly doesn’t sound a lot of fun, if you’re looking for an RTS.
Where the game makes me laugh is the character interactions and story, which while being cheesy, full anime tropes, and nothing new. Was funny, and enticing enough to keep me going, but it’s an anime game with all the trappings (Something Nic from Destructoid couldn’t seem to forgive).
As a tower defence it does a fairly decent job, it has all the features you’d expect. As well as building and demolishing, you get fortify and modify, and move. Fortify, does what it says, increases the units health and strength. Modify means you can add a civilian module to the weapons, increasing your population cap by 500 a time. Initially you’d think this was a bad idea, but it’s just a way of getting around the space problem, the civilians in those modules are never in danger, unlike those that live in the actual residential areas!
Space is a huge issue, since there are tracts of land you can’t use in the cities. Maybe down the road they open up, but so far (after 6 chapters) they haven’t. So you have to always be considering you’re available space.
This does make the game a bit more tactical, since you have to make some hard decisions in some cities, do you have more residential or more weapons.
The outer circle is for temporary units, which in this case is a bit of a misnomer, the units you build there are all one shot units. Shield Walls, and inhibiters to stop bosses that are essentially one shot things. For the shield walls once they destroyed they’re gone, they can’t be repaired or upgraded. The inhibiters are pure one shots, they stop bosses once and thats it.
Another mechanic they added into the mix was the operators, and this is one of the areas I do get a little frustrated with.
The operators have two stats you need to keep an eye on, Focus and Energy. Focus rises over the course of encounters, the higher it is the more often the operator will use their special ability. Energy on the other hand decreases over the course of encounters, as they get tired. If it ever reaches zero then their focus also crashes to zero. So you’re also having to consider those elements as well.
To help counter this you have consumables that you get when both you (as the commander) and the city level up, as well as additional personel. However these new personnel are trickle fed to you over the course of the game, leading to some frustration.
After each battle you get a Operator Report, and asked to reward the one you felt ‘contributed’ the most. However this wasn’t really a reward, it was more like looking for who has the least energy and choosing them. Picking anyone else would lead to wasted energy, and then you losing an operator due to exhaustion.
Another thing that caused me some frustration was it’s lack of information given to you during game play. For example it gives you a mission to kill a certain type of monster with a certain weapon, but it doesn’t show you what that mob is. You have to go hunting through list, which is hidden in the status screen, to find a picture of the monster in question.
Yet despite that the game play is still addicting enough to keep me playing.
So what are the battles like? Early on they’re fairly dull, like a lot of TD games, it starts off slow. However due to the way the game mechanics work the battles are fairly hands off. You’ll occasionally need to rotate a ring to get better positioning, but thats it. For the most part all the hands on stuff takes place before the battle.
However don’t let that fool you, things ramp up rather quickly if you’re playing on hard mode and once you get more cities under your control.
Now, I’ve gushed enough, lets talk about whats bad about the game, because it does have it’s issues.
Firstly, it’s graphics are pretty grim. On the PS Vita version it’s very low resolution and I found it hard to identify my owne weapons at times. If I lost track of say the Rex Laser, it leads to some frustration trying to spot it again. This is due to the low resolution of the art, and after a while I did find this also impacted the gameplay a bit, trying to identify certain monsters was difficult because of it.
Hopefully the PS4 version has higher resolution assets that can alleviate that problem.
However for me the biggest issue was the crashing, something I’m not used to on my PS Vita. What I ended up finding was that if I played for more than an hour or so the game would crash, hard. If I minimised the game, or put the Vita to sleep it would then crash after the next mission. Now crashing wouldn’t be to much of an issue if the game allowed you to save, but it doesn’t.
There’s no manual save, it’s all auto save at set times, which is annoying as hell, so far in 19hours 37min of play time I’ve had 5 crashes, each of them wiping out the past 10mins or so, depending on wha the last mission was.
As a result I no longer play this as I travel around (played it originally on the train to work and home!) because of the crashing wiping out the save data.
This does seem to be a PS Vita issue alone however, the PS4 version seems to be more stable. Hopefully Acquire release an update.
So, all told what are my thoughts on the game?
Final Verdict
Personally I’m loving it to death. The game was cheap (£19.99), has already more than adequately hit the value for money buttons, and I’ll be playing this for a while to come. For me this is a bed time game, the battles take 5-10 minutes, which is just as long as they need to be before becoming to long.
I hope that Acquire turn this into a franchise and release another, more polished game in the future.
Right now though, I’d recommend you pick up the PS4 version over the Vita one, unless you don’t mind the crashing.
I enjoyed this game. Thankfully I didn’t experience any crashes on the PS4.