Ryu’s Musings – VoidExpanse

10256Title: VoidExpanse
Language: English/Russian
Publisher: AtomicTorch Studio
Format: PC/Steam
Type: Game, Single Player, Multiplayer, Local CO-OP
Genre: Adventure, Action, Space, Open World

Synopsis:

VoidExpanse is an open-world, science fiction action-RPG set in outer space.
Explore the vast, open reaches of the VoidExpanse, mine asteroids for valuable resources, trade with space stations and merchants to improve your ship or complete quests, advance your character with skills from diverse skill-trees, join different factions with their own agendas and stories, survive fast-paced combat with hostile aliens and mercenaries and explore the many features that make VoidExpanse an exciting sci-fi universe!

With moddable sandbox, you can create your own procedurally generated galaxy to discover, or build a persistent multiplayer world to ally with other players – or destroy them.

Features:

  • Open exploration of procedurally generated galaxies in sandbox mode.
  • Design your ship. Use hundreds of different modules to customize it to your liking.
  • Extremely deep and complex combat system in real-time.
  • Factions with their own agendas, people, territories and story lines.
  • Extensive skill-trees with many paths to specialize your character.
  • Meaningful trading system. Trade with NPCs or stations and find profitable trade routes.
  • Advanced asteroid mining with multitude of ores and mining devices.
  • Tons of other features and things to explore.
  • Persistent worlds in multiplayer!

First a huge thanks to the guys over at AtomicTorch for giving me a review code!

So, let’s talk VoidExpanse! I went in to this game with some damn high expectations, and I have to admit surprise at having them mostly met.

So what is the game? It’s an open world space RPG, which looks and plays a lot like SPAZ. I have to admit that my initial reaction to it being a Unity game was not good, but of late Unity has actually turned around and become a pretty damn solid engine for games. Skylines and Pillars of Eternity are both amazing games and both Unity games.

As I watched the download going by I found myself getting more and more hyped for the game I finally got into the game and my first disappointment comes around. While options aren’t something I look to deeply into, there’s two I look for in every game: Borderless Window and Colour Blind Mode.

Sadly there’s no borderless window mode, hell there’s not even a normal windowed mode. And while you can force it with ALT+ENT it randomly pops back to full screen. I like Borderless Window Mode since I have multiple monitors. I’ll cover colour bind mode, and why this game needs it, a little later on.

The next rather lack lustre thing I found was the world generator, we’re given a seed window with some random numbers in and a slider. No indication on what any of the numbers and sliders effect. Having come from SPAZ, which has one of the best universe generators I’ve seen (see below) I was greatly disappointed.

SPAZ Universe Builder   VoidExpanse Universe Builder

                                       SPAZ Universe Builder                                                   VoidExpanse Universe Builder

Finally we get into the game, and most of my issues were promptly blown away by how solid the game plays. I wasn’t keen on the WASD/QE controls, but it was easy, literally press a button on the HUD, to change to mouse controls. Once I did that I was off roving the galaxy blowing pirates out of the water…air….space? You get my meaning!

And honestly, it was a lot of fun!

Graphically the game looks pretty damn good, despite it being a Unity game, despite it being a top down shooter, it still manages to have personality and depth. What’s more I found I loved the aesthetic of the game, ship designs are great, as are the bases. I especially loved the little touches, such as small rocket bursts when you’re turning. Honestly graphically I was expecting nothing major, but I’m really impressed.

2015-03-31_00002 2015-03-31_00003 2015-03-31_00004

2015-03-31_00005 2015-03-31_00006

I also liked the planets and suns, so much so that on a couple of occasions I got so into watching a sun I accidently flew right into it and blew up 😀

However, it does suffer in one area, the mini map/radar map. It’s hideous, clunky and doesn’t flow smoothly. As I was flying around a system I was shocked to see the radar map hiccupping along, rather than flowing smoothly. What’s more, as someone who is colour blind, I found I was having a hard time identifying anything it was showing. For me it just became a fuzzy blur that I ended up ignoring, and only used the yellow indicator around the edge to track my mission locations.

For me, this was a huge let down, and something I hope they can fix down the road. While the system map has the same issues, it’s to a lesser degree, since it’s easier to see things moving on that map so you can make a fairly solid guess.

So let’s talk campaign, honestly I’ve no idea WTF is going on with it 😀 For two reasons, firstly the progression of the campaign left me getting my arse kicked by aliens that were significantly higher levels than me. Also, the second time I started to do the campaign I got distracted and went off on a side tangent just exploring. That is one of the good aspects of the game, you can drop in and out of the campaign.

However, part of the problem I think lies in the randomly generated universe. The fact everything is random means you can end up in a situation like what I experience. Being sent into a lvl48 area while being lvl16. This is certainly do able, but it requires you to have a decently put together ship, which you may not have because the stores are all random as well.

I found this leading to some frustration, as I was wanting to progress with the campaign, but I couldn’t because of levelling. It’s not like I could just grind a few levels either, 32levels is a big difference to grind out.

Edit: In my 5th run through I made level 30, had a T2 ship with good weapons and stuff, and still got my ass kicked big time. This for me took frustration to a whole new level, and resulted in me giving up on the campaign and just going around doing random missions and blowing ships up.

After 12 hours I found boredom setting in as well, all the missions are exactly the same; deliver something to a station, kill a pirate, mine 100 ore. There was no variety, in fact on one occasion in 4 separate stations I was given the exact same kill a pirate, and faced the exact same ship. Same was with the mining mission, it’s always mine the exact same ore the exact same quantity.

This is a shame, since the game actually has a rather large variety of ore, some harder to mine than others, and coming in different quantities. Having the missions given been to get different ore and different ships, with different rewards, would add variety, and actually reward people that decide to go down the mining or random mercenary track.

Given that the advanced mining was something they make a big thing off in the feature list, I was expecting more from it.

The other aspect I found lacking was the trade, again something they made a feature of, but for me it never really seems to deliver. I think part of this is due to the fact that trading has never really done well in games, I can’t think of a single game where trading has really ever been a good part of the game. It always degenerates into haul some cargo for an hour from one end of the universe to the other for a bit of profit. However from what I’ve seen so far the profit you gain is not worth the effort, rather you’d do better just doing more combat or mining missions.

One of the elements I was eagerly looking forward to was customised ships, but sadly that never really comes about. There is a good about of customisation, however it’s also limited in the fact that ships can’t have all weapon types. For example, let’s say you find a ship design you like (I loved the Banshee), so long as you’re wanting to use lasers and ballistics, you’re good. If you want to add missiles or mines to your ship you’re shit out of look as they’re restricted to certain ship classes.

Given how much variety the rest of the customisation has if they change it so you can build your ship the way you want it, it’ll be one of the best ship building I’ve seen.

So you’re probably sat there now thinking that after all this ragging on the game I’m going to declare it garbage and not worth picking up, right? Well, you’re wrong.

There are several factors that make me want to say go out and buy this game:

  • Cost: This game is stupidly cheap, a hell of a lot cheaper than I was expecting. For $15 you’re getting a lot of game, that looks pretty damn good
  • Lots of game time: Taking the campaign out of it, you have a huge open world sandbox to play with.
  • Developer Support: Going from their feed the developers have a lot of plans for this game and aren’t just sending it out to die. Rather they’re active with the community on how to expand the game.

Cost is always a big factor for games, and of late AAA games just haven’t been fulfilling their obligations. We haven’t had a a good solid AAA game for a while. So up come developers like AtomicTorch who produce a solid game for a fraction of the price. Yet at the same time cram it full off goodness.

There were a number of things that worked really well, for example, control is simple, but hard to master. I loved this, using thrusters to move around makes for some hilarity. I found myself flying into asteroids and bits of debris as i flew around and it almost always came after I comically tried to maneuver around them. You get used to it over time and i felt that it’s the perfect system for this game.

I also found myself loving the fact that i could blow up incoming missiles. Gone are the days of fire a missile and you know you’re gonna hit. Now you can use your thrusters to maneuver around them, or blow them out the sky with your guns. Bloody awesome!

What was also great is that while I initially thought access was gated behind the campaign, it actually isn’t. The device you need to open the gates to the alien sectors can be obtained without doing the campaign. This means you have total freedom of choice you can do the campaign, go totaly off on your own, or drop in and out. So this makes it have a EVE Online sort of vibe to it, though without the mass of spreadsheets lol.

I can’t deny that this game has a lot of work ahead of it, but to be honest what we have here is a good starting point. Whether it’s through DLC or free updates I’m looking forward to seeing this game grow. Yet at the same time, I have to admit that this game does grab you, I can easily play 3 to 4 hours before it starts to lose its shine. Then I’ll stop for a day or two and pick it back up and carry on for another 4 hours or so, and I have to admit that it’s always been fun, just a bit frustrating at times.

I would also say that even after multiple attempts (i’m currently having 2 playthroughs, 1 sticking with the campaign and the other free play.), there’s loads to keep your interest. Flying around never gets boring.

Developer support is a huge thing, most games don’t really get vast amounts of developer support. AtomicTorch are looking to buck that trend and have a news feed built into the game directly (much like SPAZ i might add). This feed lists their future goals for the game, and frankly if we get even half of those we’ll have an amazing game.

So yes, I would recommend this game, for its price it’s a good game. When the dev’s are through with the updates, DLC and patching, and seeing it as being a great game.

Before I go I do want to touch on the multiplayer, which I’ve never been able to get into. Since I’m running the latest version of the game thanks to steam, I’m incompatible with the few servers that were running a different version of the game. So I’ve not been able to explore how this game is in multiplayer, which is a shame since I think this game would really come alive there and take on a whole new dimension.

The game launches on Steam on 2nd April 2015, though there’s no option to pre-order right now. You can however buy it directly from the Developers Website and get a DRM version and a Steam Key.