If I am being completely honest with myself and everyone else, I was quite skeptical when I first took a look at Auralux 2: Constellations from War Drum Studios. To put it bluntly, the game looked simple for lack of nicer terminology and I already have a bad habit of getting bored quickly with games, even if the graphics tend to be really pretty like they appeared to be in Auralux.
If life has taught me anything at all though, it is that things are often not as they appear and on this notion, I decided to give Auralux 2 a fighting chance. Long story short, I have no regrets for doing so.
The game starts off simple enough with a simple concept. You simply need to conquer the universe. (Not really; just the mini-universe of whatever constellation you are working in. Baby steps to world domination of course.) To accomplish this, you are started with a single planet that produces units to each beat of the earth. From here, you upgrade your planet and take over other planets to produce more units in a continuing spiral to conquer your opponents.
You soon figure out that the game is not quite so simple as it looks and there is quite a bit of strategy involved. When you send units from your planets to conquer other planets, you leave the planet weak, undefended and open to attack from your opponents. What this means is that you have to strategically think about what planets to conquer and in what order you should go about this along with figuring out which opponent needs to be taken out first.
I absolutely adore strategy games. The downside is that I lead a pretty busy and hectic life and often have to put down a game for varying periods of time. With most strategy games, this leads to the frustration of forgetting exactly where I was and what I needed to do next and having to restart the level at the very least; sometimes even the game. This was absolutely not the case with Auralux: Constellations.
I could start a level before a shift at work, pick the game back up after work and pretty much instantly know what my next move needed to be from just a moment or two of looking at the level situation.
The other thing that caught me off guard a bit (in a fun and surprising way) was that as you progressed through the constellations, a certain level of aggression was pretty vital to actually get anywhere. It would get to the point that one of my opponents would send all their units to attack one of my planets and I would just give them the planet and systematically attack and claim every other planet since they had left them undefended and free for the taking; my taking of course.
For future excitement, there are supposed to be 150 levels, so I don’t see myself getting bored with it anytime soon, especially as I can just carry it around on my phone and have it accessible at my fingertips pretty constantly. There is also an online multiplayer so you don’t have to feel as though you are always at war with the game itself. You can also destroy, I mean play with, real-world people.
For those of you with XBox One and Playstation 4 Consoles; don’t worry. Your time is coming as War Drum Studios plans to release on those next year.
As always, thanks for reading!
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