On the 25th of January 2008, Petroglyph Games launched their new R.T.S. "Universe At War". Since then, the game developers have been working to get the Xbox 360 ready to launch later this month.Hit more to find out a little about the game.

In "Universe At War", players take the role of one of three unique factions.

The Hierachy live in giant walkers (seen in the picture). Attack with their walkers, troops, flying saucers and a whole lot of brute force they can, quite literally, crush their enemies.

Or maybe you would enjoy a more technological race - the Novus.

The Novus are, apart from one unit, are all sentient robots. They can be compared quite readily with the elves from lord of the rings. They're stong in groups, but very weak as individuals. The race uses "flow conduits" to get around the map extremely quickly to where the action is. The faction has a very good economy (through the use of "recycling centers") to support it's fairly expensive army.

Finally we have the Masari

The Masari are a more old fashioned RTS faction who's architecture quite resembles that of the aztecs. The factions main strength lies in its ability to switch between light and dark modes, allowing its weaponry to apply different types of damage and its troops access to different abilities. Unfortuntely, the masari have a cap on their resources at 800. All raw materials (the games currency) are collected through "Matter Engines" of which only 5 can be built (all factions resource gathering buildings are capped at 5) and each can only store a limited amount of material where as the 2 other factions are free to collect to their hearts content.

Obviously with this originally being a PC game, the designers have had to modify the controls and the HUD to suit the consoles traditional thumbstick-based controllers. The main change is in the HUD as it as been scaled down and moved to the top of the game screen. You'll also have hints at the bottom of the screen, reminding you which buttons to press to get each menu - which I expect could get incredibly irritating, so let's hope theres an option to turn them off. A nice little feature of having buttons for each menu, is the ability to bring up production queues without having to click on the associated building.  To counter the PC's precision mouse movements, the 360 will gain a D pad snap-to feature allowing players to instantly and view the nearest troops in the direction pressed on the D pad. There are plenty of other minor changes to counter the PC's advantages too.

With the release of the 360 version, the games multiplayer will realise it's full potential as the first RTS ever to allow cross-platform games between Xbox 360 and PC.

Having bought the PC version of this game, and owning a 360 too, I await the release of this version and i'm eager to play a 360 gamer to see how even it is.