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Review:

13th October 2002:
Project Nomads
Fortify your flying island and then take on the might of the sentinels in this action-strategy mix from CDV and Radon Labs.
Posted by Marc Hull - PC - UK and Europe

Project Nomads is an unusual game from German developers Radon Labs, where you become one of three nomads who are attacked by the sentinels on a quest to find some ancient artefacts. Your craft is crippled and crashes onto a flying island, but having bailed out earlier you fortunately end up in one piece, if stranded on this flying chunk of earth. In a chance of lottery-winning proportions, your crash just happens to have unlocked a Master Builder, a member of a dying guild, who guides you through your quest. Firstly, though, he helpfully explains the game's concept by teaching you how to transform the flying debris on which you landed into a fighting island worthy enough to take on the sentinels themselves. He conjures up a few artefacts for you to collect, and once picked up, these grant you the ability to construct a building of their relevant type. To begin with you create a lighthouse which acts as your 'base' and, if destroyed, will end the game. Next, you place a watch-tower on your island, which allows you to move your island to any available destination. Finally, there's the gun-turret, which is your most basic form of defence against the sentinels.

Having built up a thin layer of defence on your island, you're pretty quickly attacked by some small sentinel fighters, and this is where the real fun begins. Gun Turrets won't fire on their own, so the only way to take out your attackers is to climb into the gunning seat yourself. In this mode, the game switches to a first-person view with a cross-hair in the middle of the screen to allow you to target the enemies, and then clicking the mouse will fire a single shot. At first, it seems incredibly difficult to track the fast-moving fighters, especially since the turret is confined to move within certain angles, making it impossible to target them when they're up high, but after a while it will become a slightly less daunting task. Having eliminated the enemies, you set about your quest to free your fellow nomads, who were captured by the sentinels, and allow the Master Builder to take revenge on them for locking him up.

Project Nomads has always been described as a multi-genre game, and the final product certainly doesn't disappoint. There's a strong storyline portrayed through realtime cut-scenes, exploration aspects when you come across new islands, shooting sections that involve both your character and your island, as well as flying bits after you've constructed an air-field to build planes. What makes it even more impressive is the way that each different genre is combined to the others almost seamlessly, unlike in other multi-genre games where the different styles have been split up into levels, leaving them generally feeling a bit disjointed. Quite often a single level in Nomads will require you to explore an island, construct new buildings, shoot at enemies using gun turrets and fly into enemy territory using a plane, and it will all feel completely natural.

However, possibly even more impressive than the game's mutli-genre aspects is the world in which the story unfolds. Every place you explore is on a floating island, with clouds both above and below, and some excellent atmospheric skyline effects that give it a generally polished look. Although your island is relatively small, the ones that you'll come up against are massive fortresses, with hundreds of defensive units such as barrage balloons and bombing planes to stop you in your tracks. Also, the ability to fly anywhere with the aid of your backpack, or by taking command of a fighting plane, allows you to get a great view of all the action.

Graphically, Project Nomads is pretty strong, with a great sense of scale and a massive view distance that doesn't suffer much from pop-up. Although the islands added for scenery look quite barren and angular, the ones which you explore are typically much more detailed, containing trees with leaves that sway in the breeze and ancient ruins to be explored. The characters themselves are also of high quality, with fairly smooth animation sequences and lip-syncing during cut-scenes. However, where the game seems to fall over is in the frame-rate, which can be very inconsistent. We were running the game on a 1.9 Ghz Pentium 4 with GeForce 4 and found that, although super-smooth at 640x480 resolution and fairly good at 800x600, once we bumped it up to 1024x768 it really started to chug along, with many action sequences being unplayable because the crosshair would move too jerkily to aim. Overall, this doesn't impact the game too much, since it still looks pretty spectacular at the lower resolutions, but for tech-heads who want to see as crisp an image as possible, this might disappoint.

For sound, the game mainly contains atmospheric music that fades in and out during key points in each of the levels. The score itself is mostly classical, which suits the game's style well, and seems to be of fairly high quality. However, you may find that in some levels there's no background music at all for a lot of the time, leaving it up to the sound effects to fulfil your audio needs. Fortunately, the game contains many nice effects, such as bullet noises that actually change tone as the bullets fly past you, so during action sequences your speakers will be pretty busy anyway. There's also a fair bit of speech in the game to accompany the cut-scenes, and this is generally done well. However, some of the voices don't quite seem to fit their characters, and sometimes the on-screen text seems to get out-of-step with the voice.

In terms of gameplay, the multiple genres in Project Nomads provide plenty of variety, making sure that you won't get bored quickly, but you'll soon find that some areas are better than others. Using gun-turrets, for instance, gets tedious after a while because you're position is fixed and they're difficult to aim at moving targets, but unfortunately there's no way of letting the computer take over and control them for you. This becomes more of a problem when you're in a large battle, since you can only man one turret at a time, and quite often will have to leave your island undefended while you complete the level's mission. Weirdly, the airplane will attack enemy craft without you having to pilot it, but quite often you'll be using it to complete the mission anyway.

For length, the game has 31 missions that are all fairly large, and a strong storyline with many great cut-scenes to keep you interested for a long time. Each of the three characters also has a different set of buildings, although they all perform similar tasks. There's also a multiplayer mode, where you can take your islands online and battle against other people, although the system for setting up these online games seems quite basic. However, the game's developers are promising extra content to be made available online to extend the game after the main game has been completed.

Overall, Project Nomads is a good, innovative game which both looks beautiful and plays well. It's not perfect in any one area, but as a complete game it works pretty well, and should satisfy any action/strategy fan for weeks.

Marc Hull

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Review Summary:

Project Nomads tries to combine many different gameplay genres, and manages to do it pretty well. There's a strong storyline, action, adventure and strategy aspects, which are all nicely blended together. Despite some minor problems, this is well worth looking at.

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