Some of the levels actually include futuristic holocaust bombardments of planets until they finally submit to your raw firepower with the death of millions and sometimes even billions of sentient life forms.
Thecontrol system of the game is similar to other real-time strategy games, themain controller of the game is the mouse that lets you control your fleets,economy and menu systems. The menu systems in Haegemonia are extremelyprofessional and are very easy to navigate, thumbs up to the developers DigitalReality. In order to progress through the game, you must discover and mine newresources such as asteroids and planets that gives you capital to create newunits and research new technologies. This underlining theme is prevalent inall good real-time strategy games, so if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The onlymajor obstacle with the interface of Haegemonia is learning how to control the3D gaming environment because as you all know, you can virtually go in everyangle in space. Fortunately, the developers have included various views and mapsthat help you move units with ease although it does take an hour or so to feelcomfortable with the control system.
Anotherimpressive feature of the game is that all your units gain experience on the missionsthat increase their skills such as accuracy, piloting and firing weapons. Youare also awarded hero characters that you can deploy just about anywhere in yourstar system or even in enemy territories. All your heroes have variousattributes such as political, military or sabotage skills.
Thecombat is quite straight forward in the game (although you must pause thegame before you engage the enemy), you simply select the units you wish toattack the enemy and then watch the spectacular fire fight. The main problemwith Haegemonia (as with other real-time strategy games) is that you can createonly limited units which is a shame because you will not see any huge spacebattles like the end of Return of the Jedi. On later levels, you will discoverwormholes that let you transport your capital ships and colonists to otherplanets for colonization.
Graphically,Haegemonia is an amazing visual treat that not only contains some beautifulamazing CGI cinematics but awesome ingame graphics that contain a plethora ofspace paraphernalia such as star ships, planets, asteroids, suns and thelike. The game engine is truly magnificent and contains some beautifullighting effects, amazing texture details on the planets and even reflectivesurfaces on water planets. All the star ships have been created with polygonsand actually look quite detailed when they fly around the various star systems.The combat effects in the game contain a variety of different effects such aslighting, particle effects and brilliant explosions that appear to have beentaken straight from Industrial Light and Magic, the developers responsible forthe various Star Wars movies.
Thebackgrounds of the game are also amazing and contain various stars, nebula,black holes and other galactic wonders. Even the minute things in the game thatyou would probably not notice have been included by the developers such as dayand night on planets and you can actually see the heavily populated areas fromspace when the planet has fallen to night. If you look at the second screenshot,you can actually Australia that has been faithfully recreated that almost makethis game look like a space simulator.
Thesoundtrack of Haegemonia: Legions of Iron really helps set the futuristicatmosphere of the game and contains enough ambience for it not to be annoying.The voice acting of the game has also been professionally done and contains somegreat character acting that really suit the characters in the game. The soundeffects of the game contain all the explosions, sounds of futuristic weaponryand strange sounds of space to help this title all come together perfectly.
