1/26/21-3/12/21 100% Story
This one is on me. I completely misunderstood what type of game this was. Some people may love it, but I definitely didn't.
The game has you taking on the role of an inmate (or several) on a prison starship that has been stuck in a Nebula along with a bunch of other ships. The ship's AI pulls you out of storage in order to find a way to free the ship and1/26/21-3/12/21 100% Story
This one is on me. I completely misunderstood what type of game this was. Some people may love it, but I definitely didn't.
The game has you taking on the role of an inmate (or several) on a prison starship that has been stuck in a Nebula along with a bunch of other ships. The ship's AI pulls you out of storage in order to find a way to free the ship and escape the nebula.
Now, that seems like a fantastic premise for a story. I was picturing a group of rag-tag convicts reluctantly working with an AI for the everyone's survival. Struggling to survive while encountering the other inhabitants of the Nebula, having to trade goods and make complex moral choices. Ultimately, the AI may have turned on you at the very end in a climactic battle to free your fellow inmates. This is not the case.
The game is not very story driven. There are a few comic book style cutscenes (The cheapest type of cutscene) depicting the AI instructing you what to make next. They are supposed to be funny, but missed the mark for me. Stuff like “You need a Printer to print a Citizen Card to escape the Nebula” and “The Printer broke, so you need a Cooling Device so it doesn't overheat”. Then you are put into they eyes of a generic inmate with a basic set of supplies to hop from ship to ship on a board game-esque map to find the components for these devices. Bring the components back and get sent out for another set of components for a different device, until the game ends.
If you should die on these excursions, you are jumped back to the beginning of the board game map in the shoes of another inmate. The inmates have no spoken lines and nothing really distinguishes them is a trait or two (One may be taller or faster, or better with guns). Even in the cutscenes the inmate has a helmet on so the designers didn't have to worry about what they look like.
Most spaces that you stop at on the board game map have a ship to explore, which could have been neat, but because each ship is randomized it winds up feeling repetitive and frustrating. Deaths come cheaply while you are trying to find supplies and components and you do almost no damage to any enemies. When stealth inevitable failed, I found myself just running as fast as I could through each ship to pick up anything I could reach. The ships can also have random variables like limited oxygen or complete darkness to make things more difficult.
The graphics are cell shaded, which is fine in games like Borderlands. The thing that really made it feel crumby was the enemies looking like paper cut outs moving across the screen. Usually they would float so they didn't need walking animation.
I get that all game developers don't have a huge budget to work with, but the only word that kept coming to mid for this game was “lazy”. The cheapest graphics, the cheapest mechanics, cheapest cutscenes. For some reason the advertising compared this to Bioshock, which makes no sense to me after playing it. The only similarity is that they are both first-person.
It took me a month and a half to finish a six hour game. I would not recommend it and I'm very thankful that it was on Game Pass and I didn't buy it.… Expand
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