So you’ve just gotten your hands on this game called “Massive Assault.” It’s by somebody who kinda sounds familiar (but you’re not sure from where) and it has some fairly nice quotes on the box. You stick the CD in the drive and page through the manual while it installs, and you can’t help but notice that the manual is a bit…imposing. It’s short enough, and it seems to make sense, but it talks about “Secret Allies (Undisclosed),” “one-time Indemnity payments,” and “recruitment blocking” like these are common household ingredients for a beer-n-pretzels TBS. You get a little uncertain about your new purchase, thinking that perhaps you’ve stumbled into a hypercomplicated mess when all you wanted to do was methodically destroy pixellated enemies. Don’t give up.

So the install is finished and you’re running the tutorial, and you see to your dismay that there are only five fighting, moving land units to a side. Five attributes, mostly ranging between 1 and 4, define the units, and they don’t seem that unique on first pass. The turns are extremely straightforward, as it turns out. And the difference between sides, it becomes clear, is purely cosmetic—the government-sanctioned Free Nations Union and the anarchist favorite Phantom League are, in fact, fielding functionally identical units. You get a disappointed feeling in the pit of your stomach, thinking that maybe there just isn’t enough to this game to justify your $40.

Be strong. Better times are near.

The player who gives Wargaming.net’s “Massive Assault” the time it deserves will find himself richly rewarded with a challenging, compelling experience. The game takes a bare-bones approach to planetary warfare, but all the same it’s lean, mean, and surprisingly deep. Players take on the role of leader for one of the two aforementioned sworn enemies, and use their resources (which take the form of countries that have chosen to ally themselves with your faction) to build big armies that smash things. Internal politics? Nonexistent. Civil unrest? Nope. Terrain? Well, it matters if you mean “pass,” “pass slowly,” and “can’t pass,” but defensive bonuses for rough terrain will not be found here, friend. The game’s simplicity is its strongest point, and turns just seem to fly by, even in the endgame when armies are slugging it out one unit at a time.

As simple as the overall game design is, the individual units really matter. The basic light land unit – shades of Dune 2’s trike or quad – is cost-effective and able to mob nearly any larger, more expensive unit. At the same time, those same high-dollar units, properly supported with tanks and light units of their own, can cause far more damage than the tanks could have by themselves. Naval units can perform coastal bombardment and, in one of the most hair-pulling tensions in the game, tactical bombers can bomb with impuny unless the city they’re based out of is successfully invaded. The combat itself has a certain brutal flavor, as units get pounded and demolished left and right and both sides just keep flinging in reinforcements.The units aren’t the only thing that matter. Take expansion, for example. Each country – friendly, neutral, enemy – gets a guerilla allotment that they get to use the first time they’re invaded and only the first time they’re invaded. These guerillas appear under the control of whichever side didn’t invade, and if that player successfully defends the country, he gets the revenue for the country. As such, the game doesn’t really reward thoughtless expansion, as such tactics simply create troops under your enemy’s control. What it does reward is forethought and timely boldness, as a country that is occupied by even one enemy unit can’t collect revenue for the turn. Playing through the “World War” options once or twice will teach the player a few nasty tricks at the hands of a capable and cheat-free AI, and the tricks work great in reverse.

In fact, the game is open-ended enough that victory really feels like an accomplishment. The only random element in the game is the distribution of allies and enemies in the World War, and while that can change the overall challenge level significantly, in every other respect the game is completely straightforward. As such, the game is at its core a test of skill, through and through, and the experienced player will know good and well when he should’ve won, and didn’t.

The production values of the game are mostly enjoyable. The worlds have a consistent, cartoony look to them that is aided by the liberal use of colored lighting for weapon effects, and scrolling the camera around allows the player to enjoy some utterly-irrelevant-but-enjoyable-nonetheless atmospheric effects. Snow falls on the “cold” planet, “Antarticus,” and the planet “Bizarria” has a purple sun and sky. The units themselves continue the cartoonish trend, with the Free Nations Union fielding boxy, nondescript units and the Phantom League driving vehicles that look fairly functional and fairly weird. The cartoonish look about the game world seems consistent as we are, after all, playing a game that details the invasion of an entire planet by a whopping two dozen vehicles total. In all honesty, the numbers go much higher on the larger maps, but never into realms that would ever be called “realistic.”

One area where the eye/ear candy falls flat is in the realm of voice acting, which is too bad, since only one voice actor was used for all of the voiceovers. She speaks English fairly well, but her pronunciations are often slightly off, her phrase-turning occasionally leaves something to be desired (“Kick their asses out!”), and her delivery generally comes off as comical when it’s clearly meant to be serious.

The story, too, doesn’t quite live up to the action. It’s surprisingly (not to say unnecessarily) complex, especially given that what we have here is a turn-based, interplanetary version of Command & Conquer’s GDI and Brotherhood of Nod. The introductory cutscene narrates on for some time about golden ages, forced colonization, World War IV, covert terrorism, multi-global revolutions, and who knows what else, but none of it matters in the slightest once the game gets rolling. It’s all about collecting more revenue from your friends, your enemies, any pesky neutral countries that were foolish enough to be caught in the middle, and anyone anywhere who was convenient to invade. The victory (or defeat) screen, continuing this theme, is just a bunch of statistics about the game just played—no “colonists returning home” cutscene or whatnot.