Apparently in the military if you want to pilot UAVs you have to take a training course. On this training course you pilot your one UAV against other enemy UAVs out in the middle of nowhere on a pre-set platform filled with artificial buildings that vary in size. You have to do this ten times before your superior is happy with your performance and accepts you in. If you ever wanted to do this but weren't able to enter the military for whatever reason, then perhaps UAV Wars would be able to amuse you for the fifteen minutes that it lasts. Otherwise, you‘re in for an awkward, short and mundane romp of some quick shooting.
UAV Wars was one of the first community games out of the gate when the service was first launched in late 2008. Throughout the game's ten missions you pilot a UAV (whatever the hell those are supposed to be, they look like flying saucers) and it is your goal to eliminate the enemy UAVs that accompany you on your little tile of buildings. You eliminate them by shooting them, which is easier said than done. Controlling the UAV is awkward and takes some getting used to; to play it properly you will have to play as if both joysticks are inverted, even though they are not. It is difficult to explain, but there is a specific way that you have to play that doesn't take long to figure out, but is still awkward to play with. You will need to be using both joysticks at the same time when moving if you hope to have any chance of being able to shoot your target, and in the later missions dodge their fire. Thought it doesn't feel right it gets the job done.
The enemies in general are push-overs. They all have life bars which are displayed when your fire makes contact with them. It takes roughly five hits to take down an enemy UAV, and with they having the ability to fire back it isn't as easy as it might sound. That said, it takes several missions for the game to start giving you enough enemies to contend with that it becomes an issue, as the first batch of missions only one two or three enemy UAVs to take down. The map design plays no role in the taking down of the UAVs in any way either; it consists of several buildings on a tile which typically vary in height. Theoretically you *could* fly low and through the buildings and track down your enemies one by one and take them out more slowly and easily. However, the game goes by much quicker when you fly high and the enemies like magnets follow suit, and that was the instinctual thing to do as it pulls them out in the open and allows for the job to happen right then over it happening slowly as the prey is tracked down.
This is also part of why the game is so short. At only ten missions, you don't have a lot of content to begin with but when you pull all the enemies out by flying high all you have left to do is fire at them and dodge, and on the most difficult of missions that will take two minutes at the max. The first five or so missions are cakewalks and by the sixth when it starts to get more crowded you'll have the controls down pat and dodging enemy fire won't be an issue, you'll be able to dodge and while dodging still hit your enemies. What makes the job even easier is that the enemies typically huddle together when out in the open, meaning while dodging you can just spam fire in their direction and be sure to hit at least one of the targets. There isn't much of any AI to speak of really, follow the player and shoot when in sight. They don't make any effort to dodge your fire, and these things combined make for quick disposals.
So at the end of the day you'll be left with a relatively easy, awkward to control shooter that plays out over a small area of space with no variety between bouts and a set of missions that last all of fifteen minutes. Indeed, you would have to be hardcore into these UAV things to find any sort of value in this package.
