When the demonstration started for this Petroglyph developed real-time strategy game I was not impressed. I wrote in my notepad, beneath the underlined words Universe at War: Earth Assault: Big-ass robot, lots of men, helicopter, mech...2012 Earth.

It seemed to me, as I watched the intro trailer, one more real-time strategy game in a genre that is growing increasingly stagnant.

But than the Petroglyph guys started showing game play and explaining two of the game's three factions and my interest grew... exponentially.

There have been games in the past that had vast differences in the way you play as each faction, but both the factions shown off in the game yesterday at Sega were so very different than what I've seen before I couldn't help but be impressed.

The Novis are a race of sorta space environmentalists. Their structures all connect with vast networks of lasers that allow you to do things like transport units around the map instantly, camouflage your units and use an enemy's attacks against them.

For instance, in one scenario a giant walker trundled up on a Novis city and when it started shooting projectiles at the city, the projectile would whip around the towers and zip back into the attacking unit. It was pretty amazing to watch. Other Novis scout units actually morphed into trees and rocks to hide from enemies.

The other faction shown off, the Hierarchy, are a race that use giant city-sized walkers. Instead of building units on the ground, this race cuts glyphs into the ground or creates crop circles to summon units from space. The developers said the Hierarchy are the Cost Co of races, the more units you buy at one time the cheaper they cost.

The walkers, once created, can be customized by building items on hardspots scattered across their mammoth hulls. Depending on how you customize your giant walker you can create combat vehicles, harvesters or entire cities. Taking a walker down requires blowing off it's armor and destroying coolant nodes. Once destroyed, Novis units can actually tear the unit apart for resources.

The more war-like Hierarchy rely on trees, cities and cows to harvest resources. In fact, cows are the most valuable resource to this space race, so Novis often spend time either defending cows or killing them off so Hierarchy can't harvest these units for resources. The Hierarchy has the ability to radiate the ground and make it unusable for the Novis. They can also use these radiation units to flood human cities and convert the population into zombie-like radiated slaves. I think this might be the first RTS game I've ever scene where you can actually move around and destroy the game's resources, a very inventive touch.

The devs said a lot of the units have dual roles, for instance on Novis unit can either generate a shield or attack, but not both at the same time. The game also includes three heroes for each faction, but they're not so powerful that they can completely change the tide of war.

The game supports several interesting modes including one called Defcon which unlocks all of the game's technology for everyone in waves as your countdown toward Defcon One.

I'm pretty excited about this game, both i's look and innovative approach to one of my favorite PC genres. And the team still hasn't shown off the third faction yet.

I talked to someone with the team after the presentation about how they were going to turn this into a workable Xbox 360 game. They said they're building their own system from the ground up for it, they even asked Microsoft about the possibility of using the upcoming thumbboard for the controller, but were told it can only be used for messaging. Dammit! Brian Crecente