To paraphrase a certain quirky games reviewer - "Ancient Space is Like Homeworld but..."

(Also... ancient space? isn't most space ancient?)

Imagine for a minute you're playing Homeworld with persistent ramifications level to level (the more you suck early on, the tougher later levels will be - so don't suck)... well Ancient Space has none of that. Careful resource management? Nope. A large variet of units? Nah. Major differences between your ships and the baddies? Nu-uh. Massive truely 3D space environments where you have to think tactically in three dimensions? Sorry - but it does pretend fairly well.

No. Ancient Space (which in TeamSpeak is pronounced "AAAAAAAncient Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace") instead goes down the Dawn of War route to being a game.

There are persistent resource points - which given the infinite nature of space, are of course severly limited in number and fixed. You can only place "buildings" on the fixed resource points (really they're turrets. Either good vs Cap ships OR small and medium ships, radar, repair, or slow the enemy) which is lucky as the AI is too stupid to try going around them.

The resources are infinite - being one of those X resource/time types, which is mostly fine, but it robs you of the risk vs reward of trying to go further and further out from your base to mine/dig/harvest stuff that was present in RTS games since Dune 2

Ship numbers are insanely low. Don't expect to re-enact cool space battles from films or previous games... the most I've seen so far was 21 slots (some ships take more than one slot). I say ship numbers are low - they're low for you. The enemy have no such troubles, and their production times are much shorter (so the poxy ships that disable your pop up so often that they get very annoying very quickly).

Ships are ... boring really. 2 or 3 of each size of ship (eventually 4 different fight sized ships! woo). The limitations on numbers and the small variety mean that Corsairs are the best thing since sliced-starships. They can imobilise an enemy and then capture it 6 of them takes on every resource area/enemy building facility I've come across) and you could build more.

Space is apparently not 3D... it pretends to be... but it's really just a blanket over some bumpy things (like it was in the original Doom). Why do I say this? because you can't direct your ships up or down... there are some floaty circles in space which are higher or lower than each other and if you click on them then your ships will dutifully move there - but you can't positions ships half-way without fist commanding them to move somewhere then stopping them midway. Homeworld might have been more years ago than I'd like to admit, but they worked out how to go up and down back then. Then there's the fact that the circles of space being transparent which occasionally causes ships to go somewhere you didn't think you were clicking because the context sensitive movement system though you wanted to go somewhere closer to the camera than you knew about. Seriously the movement in this game is almost poor enough to be a bug - not quite, but really... meh!

Between missions do your actions carry any weight? No. You can upgrade some ships a bit (and one ship a lot) by spending points which are arbitarily doled out at the end of each mission. Ships you build vanish mysteriously to be replaced by an entirely different fleet of ships the mission designers thought would see you through.

In Homeworld you had your entire race with you on one ship - because your previous home had been bombed into a radioactive hellish nightmare type affair... so it made sense that you lose your mothership, you lose. In this game despite travelling everywhere by fixed, reliable and free warp gates, you send your utterly irreplaceable carrier on every mission... not just outside the last gate so you can send reinforcements through as and when they're needed... because, reasons.

But the graphics are awesome right? Well, they're ok I guess - we are unfortunately in a time where graphics are pretty good even in low budget titles. Sure things are pretty, but no prettier than X3 for instance and that's several years old. Textures are alright, models are ok... nothing says "OMG! THIS IS AWESOME I WILL NOW DRY HUMP MY MONITOR" though.

Also, the levels are small - it's space! Why must things be so small... Warp-gates are the only way to get from one sector to another so there's no inbetween space, and the sectors themselves are tiny (compared to Homeworld).

I know by now people will be wondering why compare it to Homeworld so much? Well to those people - go play Homeworld then play this... you'll see that at no time has there been an original idea design wise. This game is trying to be Homeworld and a bit more.

People really seemed fixated on Skirmish mode in forum posts running up to release - there are three skirmish missions. No free form - decide things yourself missions... nope, 3 specific missions. The first is a Horde type game "survive as long as possible"...

There's no multiplayer. No Co-op, no Versus mode. I've heard people counter with "well, that means they can focus on the single player story" ... Well, Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaancient Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace is clearly aping both Homeworld and Dawn of War - both games had rich developed single player experiences AND multiplayer.

I can't recommend this game - not because it's terrible, not because it's below average, but simply because it's trying to be two games which were both better examples of being them. Had Homeworld and Dawn of War not existed then this would be good. But they do exist, and having played them, this feels more like a poor copy that it would otherwise.

Allow me to move ships UP and DOWN in space
Allow me to play the game with friends (co-op campaign or competitive)
Allow me to build a fleet of ships (not a couple of ships)
Allow me to take ships from one mission to another
Allow me to choose a strategy from a variety of ships and play styles (rather than severly limiting my choices by having so few unit types - best ships in the game are the Corsair and Cutlass and you have to capture those)
Increase the number of skirmish options

Fix those and you'll have a game that's almost as good as Homeworld (which if Gearbox are reading - a release date for the remaster would be nice). Till then you have an average game which doesn't stand out enough to recommend - even at £14.99

I'll expand upon this review later as I play through more of the game. The time that I've spent on it so far is merely a review of my first impression of the first 5 missions.

Compared to other RTS games, this game doesn't really do anything that better games, such as Homeworld, haven't already brought to the table. The difficulty is pretty damn hard due to the way the AI are unfairly given so many units that are all thrown upon you. The game is not difficult because of an intelligent AI, but more because you have to face overwhelming numbers most of the time which sometimes leaves you feeling cheated when you're beaten.

Example:
In mission 2, you have to face roughly 50 units with your 12. The enemy are given battleships and frigates and many fighter squadrons. You only have a carrier, a battleship and 9 squadrons of fighters/bombers. You cannot build frigates yet, and frigates are good against fighters, so your fighters get mowed down while they try to hit the enemy fighter squadrons which counter your bombers. Even then, frigates are fairly decent against bombers, which doesn't make much sense. To win, you have to have your fleet at the center of the map where your turret's angle of fire (if you haven't built many turrets, you are screwed and have to restart; the trigger which spawns all of these units is unexpected and you won't have enough time to build the turrets to counter the threat) can deal the most damage on the incoming enemy units and allow you pick off the early incoming units one by one until the battleships arrive, rather than having a massive wall of enemy units focusing on your mission critical capital ships (if you lose either the carrier or battleship, you fail).

To each mission, there is a specific formula to how you should beat each mission (e.g. you have to build/upgrade these units, attack these units at this time, use this special ability etc all in this order to win the mission, you will find it extremely hard to do it any other way). This then becomes a gruelling trial and error affair where you have to figure out the formula and win, which sometimes frustrates you to no end and limits your tactical options to win the mission. Some tactical choices you make earlier in the mission render the later part of the mission next to impossible to win, resulting in you having to go back and restart.

This game looks pretty much your typical RTS game, but not what you'd entirely expect. It may not introduce many new things to the genre, but it does keep you on your toes and is unforgiving. This can be interesting, especially for people who want a challenge.

I do not wish to give this a negative recommendation, I'd rather give it a neutral rating (some will hate it, some will love it, some will think it's just okay). But, since there is no such option, and I'd rather lean a little to the negative side, I have given it a negative recommendation. I'd suggest you wait for the eventual sale to come around if you wish to get this game, just incase you get disappointed with it.

Ancient Space is a 3D, space based, story heavy, single player, real time strategy game (RTS).

The Great:

- Gorgeous 3D space environments that should be the standard for space RTS games going forward
- RPG mechanics such as gear and specializations customization added to ships and capital ships that make you wonder why no one else has done it this well in an RTS game before
- Detailed and intricate RTS with RPG aspects gameplay works very well - a solid foundation to build upon
- Voice-acting and story are well above average for the genre

The Good:

- Intuitive control scheme
- Varying difficulty
- Nice pacing such that it is almost always interesting but not exhausting or stressful

The Bad:

- Some technical glitches present
- Graphics options are nearly non-existent
- Missions can run long at times and sometimes contain tedious overlong sections
- Occasional excessive difficulty
- This game would do very well to include Steam Workshop support for easy modding support

Overall:

This looks to be a very worthy addition to the RTS genre. While a slightly tighter and more forgiving campaign might have proved better, at $20, and given how much the game innovates in some ways (e.g. adding "gear" to your fleet of ships and the overall art direction) it is hard to find much to complain about. If you like strategy games or RTS games in particular, you should definitely pick this game up.

I've played with numerous space RTS games in the past and I have to say I like Ancient Space. I'm at Mission 4 and until this point it has a very good atmosphere, something what only older games, Homeworld or Conquest: Frontier Wars were able to give. And maybe I've played space RTS, such as Homeworld a long time ago, and I played that one on hard, but this is the first time I've lost on normal (I've lost a few times already, first during Mission 1 and then right at the beginning of Mission 3 and a few times after that. It's not an easy game.).

As a storywriter, as that's my job IRL, what I like the most that here the characters sounds life like. They don't explain evident elements, but tell it well, like if they would part of their life. This is something what I miss from others games and what I really like here, as this gave the first good impression during the first cutscene, namely that we have a character who doesn't feel the necessity to explain the whys or whens in the log, but tells everything natural.

The only thing what I've found strange that the were no VO during the tutorial and I miss the unit feedbacks (However they're synthetics, so I can live with it.). And the narrators are also doing their job well. What I also liked is that during the tutorial, the music was also able to give a great atmosphere, something what many games are unable to. And if I already speak about the music, as it's one of the necessary element, I have to say it is also great and very atmospheric.

I still have to get used to the controls and such, but I already see that the upgrades and scannable elements also make sense, and they don't feel as just filler elements, but they're really give something for your units, so as the officers and their skills. Overall, after the first few hours, I'm pretty impressed with the game as it's giving back something what only older games, such as Homeworld or Conquest: Frontier Wars were able to give. I believe Ancient Space worth the investment and your time.

My rig is a FX8320 3.5/4Ghz, 8GB Ram with a Sapphire R7 260X and on this config the game plays smoothly in 1920x1080.

Not bad, but severely underwhelming. It's the sort of thing you would find in the $5 bin at WalMart and be pleasantly surprised by. Worth purchasing on sale, maybe, but at full price there's far better games out there.

The big upside is that it's extremely challenging. Not because of the enemy AI or anything, no it's hard due to the sheer ridiculous swarms of enemy ships you will face - missions are generally pretty short and brutal slugfests hopelessly outnumbered which you can win by being equal parts clever and lucky.

The story is alright but extremely generic. It's somewhat nonsensical to me to send in your precious, irreplaceable carrier for every mission and to abandon your fleet whenever you leave the sector, but then I'm not some masterful tactician so who am I to say.

The mechanics are lacking some core components that would make the game really shine. For instance, and possibly the most annoying; you cannot modify the altitude of your ships without a lot of messing around. The maps are not open, as was implied - they are typically divided into 3 small sectors connected by warp gates. The only place you can build is fixed positions and the only thing you can build is turrets.

I could go on but I think you get the point. It has potential, but it's far outclassed, even by games decades older than it (yes I mean Homeworld 2).

Now that I've had the chance to play this game for a few hours, I can tell you that this 20 dollar purchase was very reasonable. A lot of people are comparing this game to HomeWorld, but that is an unfair comparison as you are dealing with apples and oranges.

Homeworld was great for what it offered. Massive fleet battles, graphics that were amazing for their time. A compelling story.

Ancient Space didn't try to copy Homeworld.

PROS :
The voice acting as has been stated by other reviewers are great. The story is plausible and pallatable in the same way Nexus: The Juptier Incident had a fresh spin on the old space genre.
The level of detail on the ships is great. Perhaps, because I do have a good video card, I can play it on max settings and the detail really shines.
The way you control your ships is intuitive and I felt the learning curve was negligible.
The "hero commanders" that are activated via the interface that can cast spells or debuffs(shields, more armor, more attack, enemy is more vulnerable, and so on) is a nice addition.
Having stationary platforms that help you crawl is a creative and fun idea. Has a small Command & Conquer feel to it.

CONS :
As some have mentioned, the graphical requirements are pretty high. People are having performance issues. I am not one of them.
The AI. It seems like waves of enemies continue to come your way. That's not so bad, but the game doesnt teach you that you basically just set up your units in specific areas of interest, following the rock paper scissor approach depending on what the enemy is throwing at you. You dont tell your ships what to attack as much as tell them where to be, ready for an attack. And when you get swarmed, you can issue orders to target fire on a specific ship. Point is, its more like moving chess pieces into position, and then using it, than just go and attack this target the way Homeworld did it.

I think this is a great game, relatively speaking. I hope that future projects come to fruition as a result of Ancient Space.

You can move verticaly but there's not really any reason to. The maps have obstacles that you can't go over or under so it might as well be a two dimensional map.
Its actually about controling teritory by capturing key points and is not really a fleet combat game. It has more in common with Company Of Heros than any 3D space game.
Having said that, its not a terrible game for 20 bucks. Its just not quite as advertised. I played a few missions and had a bit of fun but mostly it just made me want to play Homeworld again.

I will flesh out this review more when I finish the Campaign and try Skirmishes. My tenative review of the game is that it is quite good, especially considering the price.

Story/Campaign:
The tone of the story is short, but effective. The form of delivery for the story is modeled after general RTS Campaigns such as Company of Heroes or the Homewrold franchise. Campaign missions tend to allow the player to move at their own pace. In one mission (I believe mission 3 or 4), I sincerely messed up an assault on an enemy position, and paid the price in time and resources, but was able to recover and press on to completion. The difficulty can be quite hard, but once you know the high-value targets (Warpgates/Repair Stations), things seem to resolve themselves quickly.

Units:
Unit design is distinct both in art and play. Ancient Space uses the tried and true RPS style of unit countering, in the case of this game different weapon systems are more or less effective based on the hull size of the opponent. Once you begin customizing your units with upgrades (between missions), you can truly give your own fleet a wide range of effectiveness. It is unfortunate how limited some of the upgrade option can be though.

Art:
This is a catagory where the game tends to knock it out of the park. Each sector looks distinct and interesting, and the background space is at times awe-inspiring. All told, the artists for Ancient Space have created a vibrant and interesting space environment that I could likely look at for hours, assuming of course that I have eliminated the enemy Warpgates.



*THIS REVIEW IS DUE TO BE UPDATED SHORTLY*

I'm currently 5-6 missions in the game.

I always wanted a space RTS where you could fly and ficht into megastructures. Now I can finally enjoy it.

The game is good, and the scenario is simple but fun. Sure, it's not on the level of Homeworld, or Nexus-TJI, but up to now I enjoy the game.

There are a few cons, though, but nothing that a few patches can't solve. Here are some of main issues I have:
-The main one would be the camera being unable to zoom-out enough to have a full view of the battle. Seriously, they (the creators) should work on that, as it makes seriously hinder the gameplay.
-Ship movement sometimes seems erratic: ships get caught into the megastructures (or into each others), and it can be quite tedious to direct them waypoint by waypoint. (then again, it might be better if the camera could zoom out far enough)
-3D movement is not explained in the tutorial or in the control menu. (Either that or I was really distracted when playing the tutorial). It took me quite a while to figure it out. ("g" to summon movement disk, then "left ctrl" to ajust altitude, btw) It is also somewhat buggy, and I often have to give the order twice.

Outside of those few points, which are quite easy to deal with once you get used to the game, I have no complains at all about the game.

Don't get your hopes up, it is not a new Homeworld!

What you will get is a space themed RTS with unit building, light resource management (think CoH) and the ability to upgrade your mothership only between missions.

The Campaign is a two edged sword, very difficult with seemingly impossible situations but also very rewarding if you manage to work your way through.

The biggest disappointment for me was the lack of a skirmish mode. Well there is a menu button which is called "Skirmish" but behind that are just 3 maps with missions attached to it, like a horde mode for example.

Pros:
+nice graphics
+nice sound
+difficult campaign
+small but interesting map design

Cons:
-no skirmish mode
-not very innovative/deep mechanics
-pathfinding is a bit edgy

Overall I would give it a neutral rating mostly because of the missing skirmish mode.

An unsatisfying drink for the parched rts fan. Bland is probably the best way to describe this game. Limited maps inspired by moba lanes with limited placement "tower" defense type buildings thrown in.

To be honest pickings are slim right now in the rts genre unfortunately which inspired my purchase. The best thing I found about this is the price. My disappointment was slightly eased.

Its pretty but like a great looking painting, you wish you could go there but when you reach out you realise its just 2d afterall and you can only look...

Homeworld ruined pretty much any pleasure which might have been found here with comparisons but even standing on its own merits its weak.

God knows how many years on and nothing has touched homeworld since.

Just soulless.

Edit - missed a word out. Cleaned up last paragraph.

Did you like Homeworld?

Do you like long-form strategy games with a story-focus?

You will probably like Ancient Space.

This is the real Zen Fish Simulator we deserve!

Command your fish in the inky black and beautiful fish tank to attack the enemy fish, protect the important fish, escort valuable fish from one part of the tank to another etc.

(Seriously I have never seen a spaceship game with ships that are more like fish: the ships bob up and down while changing course and leave trails as if it's a disturbance in the water. It's a good thing in case you couldn't tell. Very relaxing).

(Also if you wonder if it's like homeworld, yes it's pretty like homeworld at least as far as I remember).

Interesting game so far, i dislike that fleets to not carry over into the next mission, instead a preset of ships will accompnay you with only the main 2 ships awlays with you. The game play is let down with the z plane movement (up and down) the ships can move in this plane but you cannot command them to which causes the ships to get stuck on obstacles when the only way to procceed is a passage lower or higher than the ships current position. Its an average game that will entertain until the home world remastered edition is released.

Very dissappointing that when the developers release updates all saved data is erased. The only way to play old saved games is to uninstall those updates.

First of all, game strikes out on the whole "space fleet battle" concept, that's cherished by many homeworld fans. It's more like Starcraft with ships instead of marines. Maps are full-3D and filled with gigantic space objects you have to fly around but despite stunning looks that doesn't affect battles since ships don't have weak zones or blind spots to exploit with different attack angles.
So we've got a very basic space-themed story-oriented RTS with nice visuals, fleet upgrading between missions, battles on multiple maps at the same time (when "sectors" aren't used as simple map-extender) and very interesting voice acting, where characters keep themselves forcibly calm and professional that transfers their stress and despair surprisingly good.

Biggest issue I got so far is poor performance on my gtx670. I noticed drops to 20fps in some large battles and it made me consider giving it a negative review. Overall it keeps framerate on the reasonable level and judging by the forum that's my personal issues that won't necessarily happen to others.

The game also lacks basic skirmish mode and any form of multiplayer hence replayability is a bit shallow, that may be a dealbreaker for many people.
However, if you are fan of space-themed games, this one could satisfy you. It's got solid story, nice fleet-customization and overall good gameplay.

The Story, Voice, Music and overall ambiency is in my opinion, very well done. I like the way they used "ingamestoryreasons" to justify enclosed places and the use of buildings, which can be customized to heal, or shoot a specific damage type, or support, or whatever, like tower defense.

With respect to the main gameplay mechanic - ship combat - I think it resembles much Nexus, but it is done in a more micro-intense matter, because you have to SPACEBAR-pause every few seconds to allocate a power, swap repairs, spawn a replacement unit, or issue new orders. This game is thus not really real time strategy but more real time tactics, like ground control, with some Z-axis movement to call it 3D.

Personally, the gameplay is fun and challenging even on the easier settings, and must be downright nightmare ragemode on the hardest settings.

With respect to the RPG elements... Depending on objectives you accomplish (if you even can), you receive some rewards like additional superpower (from officers), or additional secret officers. Also by collecting the yellow anomalies (which is IMHO mandatory) you gain powerups like extra resources, or materials for upgrading the fleet/carrier at the start of each mission.

My only wish was that customization had been given more freedom because now you can only customize a hull by selecing between 3 or 4 narrow options like +1 armor, or +1 XL damage or +20 speed.

Customization wrt to the mothership (carrier) is much more free, and you can choose between an offensive or defensive version that have advantages and disavantages. I have run with the Defensive one because it gives more resources per second, and you can build on its advantages by selecting from like 40 different upgrades, or round it out to your desire.

Now my main issue with this game is not even the common (like once every 6 hours) crashes, which is understandable for a very small company product, but on the choice of the engine and the way the map layouts railroad and constrict you. I know you made the game good and adapted it to work in these constraints but I'd like to think the game would have come out better if made to work in a more open envronment, specially since in some of the missiong that are really tight, camera positioning is a pain in the butt and very frustrating not being able to see clearly whats on the area and being unable to zoom out, or worse, having to look from the bottom up (this is a problem because there is a definite up/down layout and you sort of need to be able to look from the top down).

TL;DR: This game is definetly worth $20, and if you liked ground control, homeworld 1 or nexus jupiter incident, go for it. But please watch a gameplay video before buying so you can understand how different the game actually is and plays than those aforementioned titles.

Let's talk about what this isn't : Homeworld 3.

This is a story driven RTS game set in space, without the strategic complexity or depth of the homeworld series.

Why do I say this? First off, for a game set in 3 dimensional space there is no Z axis! Battles predominantly revolve around rock/paper/scissors style ship weapons and resource generation is per tick, based on owning fixed points on the map.

I enjoyed it but I was disappointed there wasn't more complexity ala homeworld.

First of all, if your a fan of homeworld this is an awesome game. No other space RTS game is as good as "Ancient Space" currently in it's time in age. Saying so, homeworld series still beats all space RTS games.

Pros:
Good story line
Chellenging when set on harder mode (which is nice to have)
OK graphics
Pretty decent voicing, narration, and music.

Con:
Needs more content the story line is too short (Needs more objective and open space exploring)
Too predictable (enemy will spawn from warp hole or base and map is narrow in where the enemy has only a few ways to enter.)
Limit of units that you can command
Limit types of units
Resource are easy to get
Enemies AI are dumb they don't know how to counter units with your current units.

I know the con list is bigger than the pros because I am huge fan of Homeworld, so anything that homeworld has other RTS space games doesnt is a flaw in my book. Yet, this game should be a collection in your library since it's a good game.

OK - this isn't exactly best optimised or smoothest gaming experience unless you have really good PC. And this is all 'negative' I can say about this title... Everything else is pure RTS gem - LOVE IT! - and am keeping my fingers crossed for more (be that expansion, sequel or indeed both...)

Attention FPS fans!

I am not an RTS fan at all and have not been since Home world 1 and 2. Infact nearly all of the games i own are fast paced action shooters and driving sims like Racing room, Race 07 and Rfactor.

However i saw this on steam and it reminded me a little of Homeworld and i decided to go ahead and give it a try, I cant tell you how surprised i was. I actually like this game alot and it drew me into the story.

The story is very good and there are some examples in our own society with regards to large coorperations, resembled in the story of this game, which i really liked. Furthermore I recognised quite a few of the voice actors, some from Star Trek (wont say which one's).

The game itself is hard to play if you dont watch the tutorials at the beginning!! or look at the tips/hints at the top of the screen as you progress through the game.

The graphics look nice and there was only one slight bug where I couldnt pan around the screen until I held left click and dragged the mouse and released. Then i could pan again.

Overall i loved this game and its good story line despite having nearly always been a FPS fan etc... I have even just gone and bought "Nexus: Jupiter incident" and another RTS game.