«

[Kosta]

Space Federation is one of underrated games. I guess they never made it big because the game has quite empty and unimpressive story line. But what a piece of work this is. It is an action/strategy game.

Races from all over the universe joined together to sign a peace treaty. But something went wrong… And here is where the story begins. You will be immediately put in a very good made in-game menu. It’s easy to navigate. You will have to select a scenario to play. They are meant to be played in order to shape a campaign, but you can easily skip to the final one or start with first (tutorial) one. Select your race (each has it’s own appearance and voice effects) and you will find your self in space with your ship.

Your ship enables you to fly to other planets and decide what will be built on them . To build you will need minerals, which can be found on rocky planets, and money that is generated by trade on population rich planets. The planets are colonised with troop ships. You will then have to build transport ships that will carry materials one way and food the other. You might also need a population transport. But beware the computer players will do everything to stop your race (attack trade routes, bomb planets…). Be sure to put enough fighters on patrol to guard your routes. And don’t forget that they need fuel to operate so a repair (refuel) ship would be a good option here. Don’t worry if they accidentally run out of fuel. You can use your mother ship’s tractor beam and bring them to closer to planet.

Defensive – The planets have a lot of defensive measures. Such as defensive shields, defensive satellites and defensive troops. But you will have to secure the important ones with fighters as well. Be sure to monitor movement on other planets (or trade ships) in your right bottom screen. You can access that by clicking a map and selecting a ship or planet to watch.

Offensive – A number of different ships is at your disposal. They will “burn” minerals and money. Each ship has it’s own characteristic and it’s hard to say which one is good and which one is bad. But if I would point one out it would be “the marauder”. It costs a lot and you need troops on your planes to create it (because it’s a troop carrier). It’s heavily armoured, but it fires slow. Once you established your defence, build a spaceport where you can storage 8 ships. Fill it up with various ships and dispatch them to enemies planet (I advise you to use way-points for that to avoid patrols). Sometimes you will need more then one space port… And don’t forget to scout up ahead with scouts.

Important game play note – Your mother ship is controlled entirely by you. It’s has an interesting physical model and maybe you will need a while to get a hang of it (if you have problems you can play without the real ship and just use a ghost ship). But bare in mind that it consumes fuel as well. Once you are out of it – the ship explodes. It also has limited armour – too many hits form marauder missile and it explodes. You can refuel and repair on planets under your control. It’s not all that black. Because you ship has cannon mounted in front of it. A cannon that might be the planet saver. It is also equipped with a tractor beam which comes useful when you need to bring in your fighters to repair.

A tip – To easily stop a ship over planet just fly it over the planet and during that press the select button. This will put you to your strategic screen and stop the ship immediately.

A special treat – Is a split screen multi-player where you can play with a partner (in some maps it’s goo to have one) or against him. There is no key-jamming. But there is also no special monitoring screen. You can still do it in your main screen.

As I said in the beginning the game was underrated. It has very good sound effects and excellent music (you can change it by using esc key and selecting change music). The graphics could better and it also lacks a good story line. Still due to it’s unique genre it’s great fun and I still play it from time to time. To bad these kind of games didn’t evolve. I give it 5 for sound, 5 for game play (especially in multi-player), but bad story line. So in the end I have to give it a 4.

Gregor