Flaws hamper what could have been a truly amazing game to something you'll need to visit the mod community to fix.
After thinking on it for a good long while, it hit me. Tactics. Every time I play, the game degenerates into a mash of players building wildly variant units each with the differing armor types. The armies collide, and boom, one side wins. Positioning is relatively unimportant, and neither is artillery. The artillery in Earth 2150 was fearsome, and a sneak bomber attack could devastate your offensive. This doesn’t happen in Earth 2160. The game plays great, but the weapons are too similar to each other, without the wider range of play options. So that’s the negative, the pluses are numerous though.
There are some true creative gems in there. The ED walls, with turrets that can unlimber and move along the length of the wall (and over gates, if they are closed), are great. But here this is hampered by the fact that the wall must start very close to your base. After that it can go anywhere, it just has to start close. Why? I mean, I realize that stops an ED player from building walls in his opponent’s base, but there has to be a better way than this strange restriction. LC base is built on tiers, which is also rather innovative. In fact, this has been copied in games such as Universe at War, and a few others. Earth 2160 almost nails it, but for some reason, selecting the BOTTOM of the tower to attack, and thus destroying the entire tower, seems unpredictable at best. Most of the time, units just attack the top.
The LC super unit is rather wimpy as well, and takes a while to even understand how to use it. It’s a giant flying saucer type ship with a death ray. The problem is, it can only fire the weapon in a line, starting from one point and ending at another. If you draw too long of a line, it doesn’t launch, but neither does it tell you this, it just does nothing.
Flaws such as this hamper what could have been a truly amazing game into what it is, a great strategy game, with amazing graphics, diverse units, a unique alien faction, but with some flaws that you’ll need to visit the mod community to fix.