Galactic Dream - Rage of War

Humans are getting closer and closer to becoming space explorers, although there's still a long way to go until the dream becomes reality. Books, video games and movies have come up with various scenarios for when that happens, ranging from glorious adventures in the pursuit of knowledge, to grim nightmares in which vicious aliens hunt down humans and put the entire race in jeopardy.

Galactic Dream – Rage of War concerns itself with the latter and envisions a future where the Milky Way is about to be consumed by a devastating galactic event, comparable to the Big Bang itself. Thus, the core of the galaxy becomes highly unstable and a chain reaction starts, which causes the stars cluttered around the core to turn into supernovas and give out tremendous waves of deadly energy that travel through space in all directions, including toward the Terran colonies.

In order to escape, the colonies prepare their ships and start fleeing the galaxy, although they highly underestimated the time it would take for the waves to reach them and they are in a fight against time, which in turn forces them to use yet unfinished technology. Moreover, a powerful alien race called Argo is also trying to escape, but while sabotaging the Terran ships in the process. This spawns a conflict between the two factions and this conflict sits at the core of the game at hand.

To depict the ongoing war between the two races, Galactic Dream – Rage of War uses basic RTS mechanics, although they are heavily modified to fit the ever-changing environment of space. Thus, while the core idea is still centered around base building, resource gathering and army building, you have to go about it in a slightly different way, since you cannot exactly send peasants to mine asteroids.

The three dimensional perspective might be a bit more difficult to get used to in this case, since there technically isn't any up or down in space. However, the game features a fixed point of view, and does not allow you to juggle too much with the perspective, except for the basic pan, rotate and zoom functions. Thanks to this, you shouldn't get too disoriented, at least until the firsts battle comes along.

Although Galactic Dream – Rage of War may not revolutionize the genre, it does bring a few nice mechanics for you to try out, as well as an incredible detailed background story to explain the events that unfold. Thus, you at least get to immerse into a rich sci-fi world, if nothing else.