Shattered Union Review

By Adder

Campaign map

The premise behind PopTop’s turn based strategy game, Shattered Union, is fairly simple, yet introduced very well in superb pre-game cinematic. Basically the United States has shattered into six factions after a series of terrorist attacks and disputed elections. Your goal: reunite the United States using one of the six regional factions, the California Commonwealth, the Confederacy, the Great Plains Federation, the New England Alliance, Pacifica, the Republic of Texas, or the European Union peace force that has invaded the Washington D.C area.

As I’m sure you’ve guessed already, every faction is unique in more than just location. The six American factions are all based around the same group of modern day units, so for the most part the units are all the same, excluding the European Union which has its own set of cool European units. Every unit has strengths and weaknesses that are decently balanced, giving the player a good variety to choose from. You can only have 42 units at a time (both during the campaign and the skirmishes), so you’re forced to balance out your force if you want to stand a chance. There’s a total of 9 unit categories each including 2-3 units, so you have quite a bit to choose from.

Unit screen

In addition to unit choices, Shattered Union also features special powers. Every faction has their own set of special powers that you can use during the game to help you, or hinder your opponent. The powers are dependant on your reputation as a faction; when you do battle your reputation is decided by how much damage you do to the map, if you do little to no damage it’ll rise, and if you make the place look like hell your reputation’s going to drop. Having a good reputation offers a set of “good powers” (think heroism and bunnies), while having a bad reputation offers a set of “bad powers” (think death and destruction). There are eleven stages of reputation that decide what powers you’ll have access to. Of course having a bad reputation has a bit of a downside; you’ll experience extra units fighting you as partisans.

The game can be split into two categories. The campaign map, and the turn based battle map. The campaign map is only available in single player. You can play the heart of the game, the turn based battle map online or against an AI.

Tank battle

The campaign is a little on the monotonous side. It’s fun for a little while, but as you progress you realize how few options the actual campaign map offers. And after fighting on one of the 24 zones for the 24th time, you realize you could be doing something more fun; multiplayer. There are, however, some cool things about the campaign map. A personal favorite is the fact that every region will retain the damage that’s done to it for the rest of the campaign. If you blow up a bridge it’ll stay blown up, if you destroy a city it’ll stay destroyed.

As I already mentioned the battle map is the heart of the game. Basically the maps are large amounts of hex-squares that represent the 24 zones of the game. Gameplay takes place turn by turn, and you have 13 “days” to take over a set amount of cities, or kill the entire opposing force. The system is fairly fun, and the AI is good enough to present a challenge… not that I’m any good though. I imagine online play is the most fun aspect of the game, but I was unable to catch a match, as nobody seems to play online.

Red vs. Blue? Naw...

For a turn based strategy, the game’s graphics are rather good. They’re nothing impressive, but they serve their purpose. The battle animations are nothing special, but they too serve their purpose. One of the best things about the graphics is the ability to zoom way out of the map, to the point where you can see the whole thing from an overhead view. At this far out it’s near impossible to make out what unit’s what, but it does give an overview of the map. Of course nothing’s to scale, but again, scale isn’t important to the game, its turn based after all. The user interface is one of the things I disliked. There aren’t many opinions to choose from in the first place, but the arrangement and graphics are not impressive. Occasionally I even found myself forgetting which button did what.

On that note, if you’re totally new to the turn based strategy genre PopTop does include a tutorial. However they’re badly done video tutorials. They may go over just about everything you’ll need to know, but they’re not interactive, and are generally pretty boring. Luckily a tutorial’s really not needed; the game can be picked up right away without much of a headache.

Next: Sound, conclusion, secrets unbeknownst to man
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