Starfront: Collision

If you’ve been anywhere near an RTS in the past year, you’ll immediately recognise the influences behind Gameloft’s Starfront: Collision. It isn’t so much a gentle nod toward StarCraft II as a giant headbutt.

Then again, if you’ve been anywhere near Pocket Gamer in the past you’ll know that we tend to turn a blind eye to Gameloft's copycat ways, so long as the game plays solidly. Luckily, Starfront: Collision does exactly this.

If there was one thing to be said for the Android and iPhone editions, it’s that they made very good use of the touchscreen when implementing the strategy controls. This hasn’t changed in the Xperia Play version.

You can select single units by tapping on them or select a group of units by dragging a box around them with two fingers. It’s intuitive and simple, and most of the time it works fine.

The Play’s physical controls have also been introduced in this version, providing a few useful shortcuts. The L and R shoulder buttons select and de-select all units on screen respectively, which is incredibly useful when you can’t afford to obscure the view of a firefight with your own greasy mitts.

The X button returns your camera to your HQ and the touchpads are used to pan the camera and zoom in and out.

These controls, while helpful, just don’t seem as fluid, and you usually end up going back to using the touchscreen all the time. But this is actually more a credit to the surprisingly good touch controls than it is a flaw in the Play’s buttons.

The controls aren’t the only surprisingly well-engineered thing about Starfront. The base-building mechanics are as good as any old skool RTS you’d find on the PC. It may not be quite as good as current-gen titles – with their expansive, blossoming tech-trees – but it's very well put together nonetheless.

Limited resources are farmed from meteorite craters and energy podiums, with drone worker bots used to expand, increase efficiency, and build new factories, structures, and turrets. It’s standard RTS fare – again, no surprises – but it retains all the compulsiveness usually associated with the genre.

The screen is also littered with plenty of useful icons (don’t worry - you can hide a lot of these). For instance, if you’re working on your base and your troops come under fire in another area, there's a dedicated on-screen button to zoom straight to that area.

The story is rubbish. That goes without saying. The storyline of StarCraft wasn't particularly original in the first place, so why should we expect Gameloft’s knock-off to be any better?

There are few other dings in this otherwise shiny teapot, too.

Occasionally the AI will refuse do what you tell it to. At one point we told all units to traverse a dangerous canyon, at which point only the two most vulnerable and important units moved, and were subsequently killed. The rest just stood idly by.

And if you want to play multiplayer, prepare to have your enthusiasm crushed by players much harder, better, faster, and stronger than you.

Some may enjoy the steep learning curve, but for others it'll take the fun out of the game. Of course, if you crack on through the pain barrier you might one day become one of the indestructible maniacs that kept Starfront: Collision's multiplayer from being any fun when you first set out, so don't give up too soon.

If you fancy a more relaxed setting, there’s always the option of playing locally with a friend, or skirmishing with the AI.

All in all, Starfront is a thorough and entertaining game. Small AI and control issues and a vicious multiplayer environment keep it from being an out and out classic, but you won't find a better real-time strategy game on Xperia Play.