For a while now, developers have been trying to port the mouse and keyboard-shortcut dependent RTS genre to consoles with limited success.

Armor Valley is another attempt to bring the genre to consoles.

Gameplay

Armor Valley blends flight combat and real time strategy where you command your forces from above in one of three aircraft. Though, command is probably the wrong term. The only decision you make for the ground units is when they should come into existence. After that, they do their own thing while you play nanny. What’s surprising is how compelling that is.

The goal of each mission is to get the disruptor unit into the enemy base, where it disables the shields you’re incapable of damaging. Two of the other units are for ground and air support, and the fourth unit is just a lone soldier, but they’re pretty important. The soldiers can capture turrets, and they can don a parachute for when they jump out of your aircraft.

Battles take place in valleys, with bases on either end. The only resource is credits, and they’re dispensed at regular rates by your superiors. My favorite thing about the way this happens is that the closer your aircraft is to the enemy base, the more credits you get. The game really rewards risky behavior, even more so because you can drop soldiers onto the enemy base for a bit of extra cash.

My personal strategy was to rush ahead and take out all of the enemy turrets. Then I’d capture the broken turrets with my soldiers and build up credits till I could summon a great force. Then the game becomes a protracted escort mission, because your units move slow, so very slow. Because offense is the best defense, I’d stay forward, destroying any units summoned by the other base, until my fuel ran out. Then I’d rush back to base to refuel and rearm.

The only way to lose a mission is to run out of ships. You start most missions with three, but you can buy more. I think you can also lose if the enemy gets a disruptor into your base, but that never happened to me so I can’t be sure of that.

Your biggest threat are missiles. They’re hard to avoid, and you only have two shots worth of chaff to disrupt them. But your missiles have longer range, so stay back and let loose. The other big threat is the other side’s aircraft. It’s got the same stuff you do, so it has machine guns, missiles, bombs and a few shots of chaff.

Eventually, you have three aircraft to choose from. The starting craft is a helicopter, the SilverHawk, and it’s the most fun. Largely because it can move left and right. The other two craft are jets, and they are a lot harder to control. I don’t play a lot of flight sims, so I had enough trouble controlling the SilverHawk. But that’s not the games fault.

The combat is quite a bit of fun, but I wish there were more variety to the missions. Each follows the same pattern, adding a few extra turrets and a slightly different layout, but with few major changes. For instance, the mission that introduces the concept of dropping soldiers on the enemy base for money reduces your usual cash stream, but that’s as different as they get.

Story

You lead a small Federation force against its adversaries. The Federation is out to protect the global peace, something they do with advanced weaponry. You’re a decorated pilot, commanding your side from one of three aircraft: the SilverHawk, Hellfire and Stormbolt. Each mission starts with a briefing, and you do have a reason for fighting the other side, but they’re pretty boilerplate. They’re serviceable but nothing that’ll blow your mind.

Style

This is one of the better looking 3D games on the Xbox Live Indie Games marketplace. It aims for realism and comes pretty close, at least as close as your average major developer could get on the last generation of consoles. You control the camera, so you can change your viewpoint depending on the situation. Switch to a first-person view for dog fights and looking from above to drop bombs.

I can’t comment on the sound, because the sound of missiles exploding crackles across my TV’s speaker, making them sound broken. It’s the worst sound I’ve ever heard. Now, my TV is a cheap house brand, so it could just be my TV, but it’s never made that sound before. So I played this with the volume down pretty low.

Everything Else

Armor Valley succeeds, more or less, by putting the commanding unit on the field and making controlling that unit a lot of fun. The strategy element isn’t very fleshed out, but the controls are complex enough already without adding additional commands. I’m looking forward to more from Protege Production.

[DIYgamer.com was provided with a copy of this game for review purposes. This in no way affected the outcome of the review.]