You know what I still love about this show? All the idiocy of this year's organization aside, it's still so sweet when you can come to a show and discover a game, which you may have not paid a lot of attention to before, but after seeing it you go, "holy crap, this one should by and rights be a hit." In short, it's still about the surprises.

Without any doubt, Universe at War from Petroglyph Studios (ex Westwood guys) turned out to be such game. We're talking about the most imaginative and innovative strategy game I have seen at the show thus far (mind you, I'm supposed to see this "little" game called StarCraft II tomorrow at the Blizzard meeting room).

In fact, it was almost impossible to keep up with all the cool features that the designers have presented for the three factions that will be in the game. In a nutshell, all races are alien and have very unique styles of fighting as well as different unit abilities. As one of the Petro guys said, to master one of their races in UaW, it actually takes quite a time investment. People who are testing at their offices would be playing one race and then call up the devs. going, "whoa, how the heck do I play these guys now?"

Have faith though, this can only be a good thing. It's not that the gameplay itself is confusing. Quite the contrary. It's crammed with so many cool features and options, you'd be spending some serious hours learning how to play. I see this as heaven for multiplayer strategy buffs.

In the year 2012, three alien races start battling each other on our puny planet. "Command the massive alien walkers of the Hierarchy, control the sentient machines of Novus, or unleash the epic powers of the Masari. With Tactical Dynamics, Universe at War's customization system, you can dynamically swap out weaponry and reconfigure units on-the-fly to thwart your foe and seize the advantage."

The Hierarchy actually uses everything on planet earth as a resource. That means, everything. Their walkers will suck up cars, cows and humans as energy resources, and Petroglyph explains, this is a whole new way of looking at a tactical map. Everything is a resource.

Hierarchy relies on the power of their massive mobile bases, gorgeous looking huge units, entire bases actually moving on spider-like metal legs across the terrain. It was beautiful to set one of these big fuckers cross the map and head straight into a Novus base.

The Novus, on the other hand, are a whole lot different from the Hierarchy, both in terms of design and in the way they wage war. Energy is their building block, so to speak, and they can (at will) transform into pure energy and move by a system of nodes across the map in no time. These energy nodes can be spread all across the map and the towers that connect them are stealth, but a Hierarchy walker can just as easily walk over it and destroy it. Novus use energy in its pure form as their only resources. And actually, this is not even a resource as you don't have to harvest it – you simply build energy structures.

Finally, there are the Masari, an ancient alien race that might have actually influenced some of our notions of heaven. Some of them will look like angels and their structures might present a weird mix of Free Mason symbols and Mayan architecture.

The Masari's big thing is that they function in two very different modes, the light and dark mode. Each of these modes when activated secures different sorts of power ups for the players.

What's definitely even more important about the gameplay is that, somewhat similar to the WoW talent trees, each unit may be allocated a certain number of talent points. Now, how you invest your talent points may drastically influence how that particular unit performs. If we factor in the huge gameplay variety in the three different races, you sort of get the picture of why this game may be "easy to get into, but tough to master," as Petroglyph, and one other very famous studio (He means SEGA. – Vader), would put it.

The game world looks absolutely stunning, with beautifully designed and varied units. The single-player game will feature three different campaigns and a fully featured multiplayer mode is planned. Universe at War is the first third-party game to support cross-platform MS Live support in multiplayer. So, Xbox 360 players can square off against the PC bunch.

Now, I had to admit I chuckled a little at that point, but the context sensitive UI looks streamlined enough to definitely give the 360 players a fighting chance (dammit).

Universe at War is scheduled to hit the stores some time this holiday season. The guys at Petroglyph are saying that a great portion of the game is already done, and it sure looked that way during the presentation. Still, the sheer scale of the project may be reason enough for a couple of delays. I'm speculating on that one, of course.

Mmm, what shall we plunder next?

There must be a way out of this!!