Realms: A Review:
Installation:
Installation is easy. Follow the link below to go to FreewareFans post regarding this game, were you will find a link to the download page. The file is a 6.28Mb executable file so there’s no unzipping needed. The game is installed by default to the C:/programs into a folder called Space time mathematics, but you can browse to install it to your own preference. The installer is quite professional, though you don’t get to chose whether to select a desktop shortcut, it’s done automatically.
Link to FreewareFans post:
http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/forums/topic/2398?replies=14
Introduction & Game info:
This game is fantastic. Just spend some time getting used to the controls and I promise you you’ll have some fantastic games with this little beauty. It’s actually a game designed for the pocket PC, so you can only play it in a window, which is a bit of a downer as far as I’m concerned as I rarely play the pocket PC games I already have, despite them being excellent games (Marble Words) That said, I think the game is excellent and I will be playing this a lot more than Marble Worlds
When booting up the game you are presented with a psychedelic introduction screen, which asks you to press any button to continue. When doing so you get a Matrix like screen that slowly ‘initializes. You can skip this by pressing the space bar which takes you to the main menu. Before starting the game you can customize it by clicking on Melee. This takes you to an options menu, which enables you to select how many races you want in the battle. There are six in total. You can have all six or just two in any battle. There is another species shown in another menu, but I can’t remember what it’s called.
• Human
• Aselli
• Tiam
• AkHaian
• Adon
• Ducal
Each race has a different style of ship, each of which has different attributes. You can see these by checking out the screen captures following the link below. There are six realms to choose from, each with its own characteristics, and each is distinctly different from the other. Also check out the video tat you can find by following the ling below:
Video of the game play:
By going into the settings menu, you can customize the number of Asteroids from between 1 to 20; the number of kills before the game ends can be adjusted from 1 to 250; the time and the time limit for accomplishing those kills from a few seconds to 30 minutes. There are four difficulty settings from Easy, Medium, Hard and Extreme. I played it on medium and found it quite hard to play, but I think it will take time to get used to the settings and controls You can also adjust the amount of tari that you can pick up within the game. Tari is essential as it gives you points for upgrading your weapons, power and shields as well as heals any damage you may have had inflicted. There are three types of Tari to collect, each worth a different amount and distinguishable by a color. These are 50 tari (Red) that also give you 8 units of health, 20 tari (blue) that give you 4 units of health and 5 tari (green) that give you 2 units of health. You collect Tari from destroyed Asteroids and enemy ships. You can see the tari floating around the destroyed asteroids and ships as there are usually several or more to collect. Other ships are able to collect this.
There is an in game HUD that shows you information on the number of ships you have to destroy, which is set up from the melee menu (as already mentioned), and how much tari (the equivalent of money) you have collected. (You can set up the amount of tari produced when making a kill from the melee options menu. You can set this to none, scarce, moderate or barrels. Setting it to the maximum produces too much to collect (imo). There is a power indicator to the right of the screen and a status indicator that shows you info about the current target and your life bar. There is other info available that shows the number of kills you’ve made, the player with the highest kills (from those you selected to be part of the game) and the kill limit which is also set via the melee menu. Once you’ve killed the number of ships that you set in the melee menu under kill limit, the game ends. (remember you can set this to 250 if you want to make the game challenging, but remember you only have a maximum of 30 minutes to accomplish this task in.
The controls are a mix of mouse and keyboard controls. The movement forwards and backwards is controlled by the arrow keys, but you can turn using the mouse as well as fire your weapons. You can access the cockpit controls to change the control mechanisms, for example there’s a toggle to turn on or off the brake, and reverse direction controls (keyboard forwards and backwards arrows), You can also adjust the thruster level from 1 to 5. I initially set it to 5 and found that a light touch set me off at a very fast pace across the realm, which is quite large. You start off with a single fire mode, which can be upgraded ia the shop, where you can purchase upgrades using the money you’ve earned by collecting mana. I didn’t get as far as this toady, so can’t post details of the different upgrades, but watching a video of the game play from the home site, there looks to be some excellent weapon upgrades, which add some excellent eye candy to an already great looking game. Oddly it reminds me of an arkanoid clone called clash, which is a space themed brick breaker/space shooter.
Images:
: All on one page:
http://s109.photobucket.com/albums/n61/Whiterabbit_01/gaotd/FREEWARE/Realms/?start=all
As a slideshow:
http://s109.photobucket.com/albums/n61/Whiterabbit_01/gaotd/FREEWARE/Realms/?albumview=slideshow
System Requirements:
I haven't a clue. There was no system requirements posted on the home site. Though i suspect you will require minimal cpu speeds and RAM for this one. :)
Conclusion:
This is a brilliant freeware game. It’s one of the best space shooters I’ve ever come across for free. There’s a total of 30 full missions, but with so many attributes to adjust from the settings menu, this game has a lot of re-playability. I’d actually pay for this game if they made a full screen mode as it’s got a lot going for it, so it’s worth 8 out of 10. Man all the games I’ve scored so far from your daily dose of freeware games have scored really high. Thank you Freeware an for finding this excellent game. I have already placed the home page into my freeware games bookmark to keep an eye on it’s progress. I do hope they release a PC version. (you know what I mean) I think you can play pocket PC games on mobile phones.