Marvelous Galaxy is a space based strategy game where the goal is to conquer all the enemy planets, so just how Marvellous is it?
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On the menu screen you are given 4 options Singleplayer, Multiplayer, Fight Now, and Return to Xbox. There is also a help icon shown at the bottom right of the screen where if you press Y, it tells you the goal of the game and the buildings, obstacles and goals. I should also note that text of the selected item is grey and in the centre of the screen is a massive white dot supposed to represent a bright star or the centre of the galaxy or something, but this is somewhat annoying as it cover sup the unselected options and makes the currently selected item harder to read.
I wish I had noticed the help the first time as I spent a good 10 or so minutes trying to figure out how to play the game, not that I think the help would have helped much as it doesn’t go into much detail about the controls and how the battle system works. It also neglects to tell you that you need to press Start to end your turn and so forth, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
Choosing single player will bring up a selection of maps small medium and large, and each with a selection of five different maps, one observation I have made is that the descriptions seem to be useless in telling you anything about the map at times, such as one that says “Wow! This part of Marvelous Galaxy is really conquered by humans. You can feel safety… or not.” now from this you’d expect the enemies to be human units but it is merely the aliens.
Gameplay is very very flawed indeed, the goal is to get a unit to an enemy planet which you then instantly conquer without a battle, here is where the flaws show up. The enemy sends out various enemies from each planet of a different type of alien, however they only target troops, if you have not yet built any the planet merely spawns one alien and it sits on the planet waiting for you to have something for it to attack.
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This is is a pretty major flaw as it also means you cannot actually lose the game, meaning it is inevitable for you to win regardless of how you play, and what’s more you can use this pretty major oversight to take advantage of the rather weak turn system. You are supposed to build units at a factory which you can access by selecting a planet that you own and pressing Y then selecting the appropriate building.
There are five different buildings on the planet screen, a mine which gives you metal resources, the “robots factory” which lets you build troops (known as robots), which there are 3 types of; “offensive”, “defensive” and “speed”. The Laboratory which you need to generate “points” which you can assign to a different technology type, as mentioned above which is required to build higher level robots. A Bank generates money per turn, then there’s the repairer building which if you have a robot on your planet lets you repair it.
I maxed out the cash by exploiting the turn based system to generate enough money to make me upgrade to over level 100, which is somewhat pointless as you are never going to need to generate anywhere near that amount of robots plus they should have made it so the max level was something like 5 so you could only generate 5 per turn making you have to go off and conquer other planets and such to add some element of strategy and risk to the game.
Once you have build a robot you can move it by selecting the planet where it was generated then a movement area will appear around it, you can also attack asteroids which are strewn around all over the place, they are randomly generated per level. Doing so will generate you a little extra metal or sometimes money but usually metal so isn’t really all that worth it.
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Another oversight here is when you have multiple robots you cant move them all at the same time you have to move each one individually and cannot group them, this makes it rather tedious moving the indicator back and forth to move them to a planet which is especially irritating on bigger maps where the planets are so far away it will take you a long time to reach them.
I told you about the enemies earlier, you can attack them or you can let them attack you, and before the battle you can chose any troops you have in the immediate vicinity to help out in the battle, also when you attack the asteroids you also initiate a battle, with a random amount of enemies. The battle sequence is rather simple you can chose to attack or move, when you choose to attack you then choose if you want melee or distance weapons, which again is somewhat of a silly feature, as when your chose enough to use a melee weapon you cant use distance and vice versa, hence you could be able to just chose to attack then the type of attack should be automatically chosen.
Plus another annoying thing here is when moving you have a grid system again to move your units but you cant just hold a direction to move the indicator you have to constantly tap the direction (unlike in the space screen where it moves itself as long as you hold down the button) which can get annoying, I’ve also found that if you build together 3 of the strongest speed units you can pretty much obliterate any enemy army somewhat easily.
One space object I forgot to mention are the black holes which merely suck towards the centre of them any troops in the vicinity and if your troop is in the centre when you start the next turn, that troop dies, but here’s the kicker, on one of the maps, there are black holes right next to the planets and the enemy troops couldn’t leave the area as they got killed in 2 turns.
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Graphic wise the game is not bad other than the menu and intro oversights and the odd rough edge here and there the graphics are pretty decent. The game music is just a load of classical music tracks taken directly from some album, you can even hear the audience applauding in one of the tracks.
Overall this game is very flawed and you can’t lose, the resource system is not very balanced, the enemies do nothing if no units on the field, the controls are annoying at times, it can take you ages to scroll across the map to get back to your planet, or to see how far away enemy planets are. There doesn’t seem to be any reward for completing the levels as right after a game is finished you get a credit screen then back to the menu so it is lacking in those areas too. The game is priced at 80 :MSPoints: which is not an unfair price, so if you have some spare points left over with nothing better to spend it on, this is one way of killing some time.
You can find more information as well as the trial and full version of the game on the Marketplace.
Review by CyberAxe
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