A strategy game with a twist, but is that enough?
Aegis of Earth: Protonovus Assault is a tactical strategy game in which you fend off waves of enemies attacking your city, while building it up with resources gathered from battles. Oddly you don’t deploy troops or weapons, but instead you rotate the city to align your city’s weapons with the oncoming foes.
As an idea, it’s strange…but it does work. What lets it down however is the execution, not to mention an incredibly weak story and forgettable characters barraging you with pointless information every few seconds…what’s worse is that there’s no way to skip the dialogue, making it tedious as I kept tapping X to try and actually play the game. I must have originally spent 10 minutes tapping X before I was free of any conversation and just had the game before me.
It’s obvious just at a glance that Aegis of Earth was done on a very small budget. I’ve played the PS4, PS3 and the Vita versions of the game…and they all look the same. The PS4 version doesn’t appear to have had any visual upgrade over the last-gen and handheld versions, which is to say…average at best. The intro to the story is told via scrolling text and a voice-over that goes at a different pace to the text, so it doesn’t sync at all.
The problem with Aegis of Earth is more than just it’s average looks, the gameplay can be confusing and the real issue is that there are far better strategy games out there. The twist of a rotating city used for attacking your foes is nice, but that’s not enough to grab the attention of a strategy gamer. They want something memorable, a decent setting…a decent plot and interesting characters/enemies to engage with. Aegis of Earth seems to lack all these.
It’s a shame because I know there is a decent game hiding under the surface, but you have to get past so much pointless dialogue to even get a hint of it. What’s an even bigger sting is that it’s a full priced game at £49.99, which I can tell you is not anywhere near what it should be…I’d be more forgiving if it was say £7-£15 on the PS Store, but no…it’s full price and that really goes against it in my book.
The Verdict
Aegis of Earth: Protonovus Assault has a good idea, but not the best way of executing it. It’s way overpriced for what it is and has a forgettable story, characters and dreadful, unskippable dialogue. There are far better strategy games out there, while this one will probably mostly be forgotten.