Review: Land Air Sea Warfare HD - Commanding Supremely
by Allan Curtis
December 6, 2010
Overview
You know mobile tech is advancing at a breakneck pace when you can find complex war games, featuring hundreds of units on screen at once. Land Sea Air Warfare HD does just this.Features
Land Sea Air warfare features complex PC class strategy gameplay, quite a few maps and many types of units.The Good
Land Sea Warfare is a powerful punch in the argument that idevices are the home of casual games. Its gameplay is based on the wildly popular and complex RTS game Supreme Commander and it manages to carry this gameplay quite well to the iPad.
You start off with just your HQ. From there you construct power plants to generate power (which you need for most units and buildings), base defenses, and land, sea and air factories for your units.
Once you build certain buildings and amass enough power, you can upgrade your tech level, which gives you access to more buildings and stronger units. Tech level can be upgraded twice.
LSAW HD uses a very simplified resource model. Your HQ generates Ore the main resource and your power plants generate power. The HQ makes enough ore that it is feasible to just use it and nothing else sometimes.
There are also special mines that allow you to construct the monstrous mega units, as well as extra ore. These mineral patches are rarely near bases, so you have to defend the mine after you build it.
The game has a good number of units too, ranging from the anti air Humvee and the Archer artillery, to the Challenger light tank and the Apache helicopter. There are also submarines, bombers, fighters and transport units, making for a rich, varied battle. These can be upgraded to heavy fighters, stealth bombers and so ion.
The game's claim to fame, besides its PC roots, is that there are hundreds of units on screen. The unit cap for a force ranges from 250 to 1000, so you can crank out a truly epic army of death. It is a sight to behold, seeing hundreds of bombers, tanks and artillery pounding the snot out of each other, although this rarely happens vs the AI.
The iPad handles this action quite well, bouncing along regardless of how many units are on screen the game stays fast.
The interface is very slick. You have access to unit grouping, so you can select units and then assign them to a group and select that group with a touch on its icon, which is very useful for selecting your fighters mid combat or all your artillery as one. You can also double tap to select all of a certain type of unit and when you build buildings you usually construct in bulk, like power plants, you can reverse pinch to build a line of those buildings at once, which is a real time saver.
The only hiccup is that double tapping too quickly doesn't select all units properly; you have to tap about half a second later for it to work, which can be a hindrance when you need to control your units quickly. Thankfully this is alleviated by the grouping system.
Graphically the game is quite good. It's textures aren't anything to write home
about, but its easy to tell what each unit is by sight, an important point in a game featuring such large armies and the game certainly doesn't look bad. Its simple graphics enable it to keep the pace up in large battles and there are some neat effects, like charred remains of tanks left behind after they are destroyed.
Soundwise the game is very good. It feature good loud weapon sounds and when units move their engines rumble loudly which is cool when you have a massive force, as they make a deafening din advancing on the enemy base. They also have voice acknowledgments and while the voice acting isn't that great, there's plenty of speech for situations, such as being outnumbered or sighting enemies, which is neat. Also cool is how buildings make noise; when you center the view on your base or power plants you can hear them humming away. The music consists of guitar rock and catchy techno tunes and suits the action well.
