Mission: Humanity, published by EON Interactive for PC

SPECS: Pentium 166, 32MB RAM, 450MB Hard Disk, 4MB 3D Video-Card, CD-ROM

Mission: Humanity is another RTS game with a twist

The twist being that instead of just a square, flat map as in the Command & Conquer series, the maps are spherical.

In other words if you set off in one direction and keep going you will end up back where you started, but this also allows the enemy to attack from any angle. Also, once you clear one planet of the alien breed (or humans if you choose to play as the aliens,

you have to load up and transfer your mother-ship to the next planets that are available. So instead of breaking off into a between-level movie the game treats each planet as a sub-level and all the planets in the solar system you are fighting in as one HUGE level. At the end of every solar system, you come across the alien HQ and, being a HQ, it is immune to your weapons, so you have to send your infantry in and place a bomb and blow it up from the inside while fighting off the alien defenders.

The game is set in the future, where the search for intelligent alien life has taken a wrong turn and aliens have almost destroyed Earth. Humanity does not want to take this lying down, so using a piece of stolen alien technology you decide to fight back.

The game has surprisingly low minimum spec requirements, so this is a must for people with a PC that hasn't been bought in the last few months. The graphics are nice enough, nothing special, but the standard troops you can train and deploy are a little on the small side. The sounds can get quite annoying after a while, but overall the game is very entertaining, and can get quite difficult with the maps being spherical and all. The only thing that is missing from this nice little number is a skirmish option, which seems to make an appearance in nearly every RTS game on the market these days.

Graphics 3/5

Sound 2/5

Game-play 4/5

Game-span 3/5

Overall 3/5