About CrystAlien Conflict

CrystAlien Conflict is an RTS (Real-Time Strategy) game, designed to help advertise the Lego Mars Mission Theme. The game puts the player in command of one of the theme's two races: the Lego Astronauts (Astros) or the Aliens (Phobians). The game takes the player into a story line that helps illustrate the Mars Mission story.



Game-play

The player becomes the commander of the race of his choosing, with the power to command units. A unit is a game sprite that is able to move and carry out certain functions and abilities. Players can select one or multiple units and click around the map to order them to a new location or to engage enemy units. Some units have special functions which give the player more options with commands.

Like all RTS games, CrystAlien Conflict requires you to collect resources in order to build structures and units. A player can mine crystals, to use for buying units and buildings, by sending out special miners to harvest them from crystal fields.



The player also has the ability to construct a number of different structures in the game. Each structure has a specific role in the game, most of them designed to produce certain units, or give the technology required to produce a certain unit. Structures cost more than units and are stationary.

Developer Info

CrystAlien Conflict was designed by 4t2 Multimedia for the LEGO company to promote and advertise the Mars Mission theme sets.

4t2, whose logo can be seen in the dust of most levels of the game, was tasked with creating a game for a specific target audience (Boys age 9) that would tell the Mars Mission story and promote the functionality and playability of the sets.

In response to these challenges, 4t2 had to research the target audience to decide on game genre and playing style, and decided upon a strategy game. Immersive story telling with animations paired with a huge amount of content and flexibility in game-play helped make the game a simple to play, hard to master challenge on marsmission.lego.com, with enough depth to be considered one of the best games LEGO ever had on their site.

CrystAlien Conflict was also superior by the numbers:

• 650,000 game plays within the first two weeks after its release
• 20,000,000 game plays in first two years
• Over 60% of players returned for more
• Winner of NMA Effectiveness Award 2008 (Games category)
  
• Top 10 global adver-game of all time!

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