Space Siege is another Clone spawned by the success of the Diablo franchise and the spiritual successor of Dungeon Siege.
As the name suggest this game takes place in the future and not in a fantasy universe. Humanity has happily been colonizing other worlds till the alien named Kerak showed up to destroy those colonies till only earth was left. And in the beginning of the game it too gets destroyed. You are on the only colony ship which managed to escape but got boarded in the process so you have to blast through hordes of aliens to save humanity. I won't spoil the story for you, although there isn't much to spoil. The story is very shallow and predictable. Everyone who has played PC games before or has the tendency to watch bad B-movies can predict each major story point about 5 hours before it happens and the game is only about 10 hours long.
The designers apparently also recognized this and tried to enhance the story by placing datapads everywhere which mostly inform you a bit about the general story shortly before the Kerak reached earth. But when you expect to see some drama about how humans cope with an undefeatable alien fleet closing in on earth and the end of humanity in sight you will be disappointed. What the datapads tell you is mostly useless drivel except for one continuos story about a man searching for his daughter Clara after the Kerak boarded the ship. The designer even used this story to add some mystery into the story by having a small girl, probably Clara, running around and vanishing behind corners from time to time. Sadly this story stopped at about the middle of the game. Only at the end, just before the final room you meet the father who is still searching for Clara. But you can't interact with him in any way, he just walks past you. And as disappointing this event is, it is still better than the main story.
But these kind of games were never known for their storytelling, so lets continue with the controls.
The movement in the game is controlled entirely by the mouse. Left click moves, right click fires the weapon. That makes walking and firing at the same time rather awkward and you will often wish that you could control the movement with WSAD. But that would likely be unbalanced as everything in the game has trouble hitting a moving target and with WSAD movement you could dodge basically everything.
WSAD controls the camera instead, but I found it easier to rotate the camera with the mouse too. The camera itself is average. Most of the time it is ok, but the camera has its bad moments like when you go through doors, go up stairs, are surrounded by enemies or fighting at long range. You can't change the degree of the isometric perspective and the problem with that is that many guns can shoot farther than you can see. This is especially bad when you go up stairs.
Now to the bad part of the game. You know, ask yourself why people do play games like Dungeon Siege or Diablo 2. Certainly not because of the story or the diverse gameplay. People play those games mainly for the loot. The endless quest to get the perfect combat gear. And because of some reason the designers of Space Siege thought that it would be a good idea to remove exactly that. You heard me right, there are no real items in the game. At various intervals you get a new weapon which you can upgrade with upgrade points to do more damage, fire faster, etc. You can also spend the upgrade points to increase you armour or manufacture health packs which, other than grenades and drones, are seldom found directly on the battlefield. Upgrade points are the universal loot and boring as hell. You quickly loose interest in exploring levels as all you can find are upgrade points as most weapons and cybernetic parts are marked on your map. Oh a chest, what's in it? Upgrade points, exactly what I wanted! Sooner or later you will be swimming in those points as all weapons you routinely use are upgraded as are your other attributes.
These points also have the disadvantage that you don't feel an accomplishment when you upgrade your weapons or armour. You simply click on armour improvement and hope that it works. You don't get any feeling that you are harder to hit now. You just play on as always hoping that spending your points on armour has any effect. In this game you hardly see any numbers so it is hard to judge if you got better and by how much.
On to the weapons. They are the normal FPS standard. You have a melee weapon from the start and quickly find some guns till you have sub-machine guns, an assault rifle, a shotgun, a rocket launcher etc. But most of the time you will use only one weapon, two when you have the rocket launcher. One for area attacks and the other for single target damage. that means that most weapons will go unused.
Another aspect of Space Siege are cybernetics. You can upgrade yourself permanently with cybernetic implants which boost some of your attributes and unlocks some new skills. Some weapons also require specific cybernetics to be installed. The downside is that you become less of a human which affects which ending you get.
Speaking of skills, the skill system is like in Diablo, just a lot simpler. There are only two trees, Solder and engineer and skills require you to have specific cybernetics installed while two rather powerful skills require you to be a full (or nearly full) human. You gain skill points at specific points in the game, together with some new abilities unrelated to the skill tree. The problem is that at least to me most skills are useless. The soldier tree nearly only has skills which enhance your melee weapon. But if you rather use guns you don't get much out of it. And while the engineer gadgets are nice in the beginning you don't use them much later in the game. So after I got the essential skills I spend points at random because to get higher level abilities you have to spend a specific number of points on lower level abilities and only very few skills require other skills as prerequisite. And especially when you play as full human you won't have much skills to choose from in the first place.
You are not alone on your mission of murder. Very soon you find a small robot called HR-V which you can customize by a rather little degree. You can upgrade the attributes of HR-V with upgrade points and you can give him one of three weapons, a fast firing weapon, a slow, strong weapon or an area weapon. Still, this guy can become quite powerful and together with you the enemies don't stand much chance. The downside is that the robot uses the same AI as the enemies which is very bad. Very often he or the enemies will idle around while you are in a firefight 3 feet away from the. Luckily you can give him simple commands.
Oh, there are other people in the game but the interaction with them comes down to one sentence and a few cut scenes.
The game itself is very easy. You and HR-V become very powerful in the end and you don't need much skill or tactics to play the game. In the first half of the game you simply throw grenades at enemies and in the second half you activate your shield and fire your rocket launcher till everything is dead. The amount of health packs is limited but ressurection/healing chambers are plentiful. And when you do die you simply respawn except when you are in the final boss fight. HR-V on the other hand has to be rebuild for a small amount of upgrade points. But he keeps all his stats so it isn't much of a hindrance.
During the whole game you will walk through linear levels and occasionally click things in your path when the quest tells you to. Somehow the designers love the number 3 as it are always three things you have to click for a quest. It gets repetitive very soon as the game uses the same setups over and over again. After two times you aren't surprised anymore by enemies hiding under crates and proximity mines placed behind doors and elevators. Still the game tries over and over again.
Then there are a few boss fights in the game. They are all very easy and play all the same. You have a big boss in the middle who at specific points in the game spawns some monsters. And you always fight by walking circles around him so he can't hit you and then activate your shield which makes you invulnerable and fire away. When the shield runs out you start strafing again.
Here you are remembered that Space Siege is a successor of a fantasy game, because every time you kill a boss you perform a finishing move with your armblade on him which makes Conan look like a peasant who barely knows how to hold a sword.
Another big part of the game is the physics engine in connection with explosive stuff (which is everywhere). And it is rather fun, at least in the beginning, to juggle around oxygen bottles and other explosive stuff and push them against enemies. But even that gets dull soon, especially when you become strong enough so you don't need those things anymore to win battles.
And that's all you do till you get the rather anticlimactic ending. The game has multiple endings based on if you have cybernetics installed and on one decision you make in the game, but at least I don't have the slightest interest in playing this game multiple times.
There is also a multiplayer modus which I didn't test, but really I don't see the point. This game is boring. If you want to play such games with others play Diablo 2. Even when you have played this game since its release every day for 8 hours and are able to play it in your sleep you will still find it more enjoyable than Space Siege.
Luckily I just rented the game and you should too if you are really desperate and actually want to touch this game at all.
As the name suggest this game takes place in the future and not in a fantasy universe. Humanity has happily been colonizing other worlds till the alien named Kerak showed up to destroy those colonies till only earth was left. And in the beginning of the game it too gets destroyed. You are on the only colony ship which managed to escape but got boarded in the process so you have to blast through hordes of aliens to save humanity. I won't spoil the story for you, although there isn't much to spoil. The story is very shallow and predictable. Everyone who has played PC games before or has the tendency to watch bad B-movies can predict each major story point about 5 hours before it happens and the game is only about 10 hours long.
The designers apparently also recognized this and tried to enhance the story by placing datapads everywhere which mostly inform you a bit about the general story shortly before the Kerak reached earth. But when you expect to see some drama about how humans cope with an undefeatable alien fleet closing in on earth and the end of humanity in sight you will be disappointed. What the datapads tell you is mostly useless drivel except for one continuos story about a man searching for his daughter Clara after the Kerak boarded the ship. The designer even used this story to add some mystery into the story by having a small girl, probably Clara, running around and vanishing behind corners from time to time. Sadly this story stopped at about the middle of the game. Only at the end, just before the final room you meet the father who is still searching for Clara. But you can't interact with him in any way, he just walks past you. And as disappointing this event is, it is still better than the main story.
But these kind of games were never known for their storytelling, so lets continue with the controls.
The movement in the game is controlled entirely by the mouse. Left click moves, right click fires the weapon. That makes walking and firing at the same time rather awkward and you will often wish that you could control the movement with WSAD. But that would likely be unbalanced as everything in the game has trouble hitting a moving target and with WSAD movement you could dodge basically everything.
WSAD controls the camera instead, but I found it easier to rotate the camera with the mouse too. The camera itself is average. Most of the time it is ok, but the camera has its bad moments like when you go through doors, go up stairs, are surrounded by enemies or fighting at long range. You can't change the degree of the isometric perspective and the problem with that is that many guns can shoot farther than you can see. This is especially bad when you go up stairs.
Now to the bad part of the game. You know, ask yourself why people do play games like Dungeon Siege or Diablo 2. Certainly not because of the story or the diverse gameplay. People play those games mainly for the loot. The endless quest to get the perfect combat gear. And because of some reason the designers of Space Siege thought that it would be a good idea to remove exactly that. You heard me right, there are no real items in the game. At various intervals you get a new weapon which you can upgrade with upgrade points to do more damage, fire faster, etc. You can also spend the upgrade points to increase you armour or manufacture health packs which, other than grenades and drones, are seldom found directly on the battlefield. Upgrade points are the universal loot and boring as hell. You quickly loose interest in exploring levels as all you can find are upgrade points as most weapons and cybernetic parts are marked on your map. Oh a chest, what's in it? Upgrade points, exactly what I wanted! Sooner or later you will be swimming in those points as all weapons you routinely use are upgraded as are your other attributes.
These points also have the disadvantage that you don't feel an accomplishment when you upgrade your weapons or armour. You simply click on armour improvement and hope that it works. You don't get any feeling that you are harder to hit now. You just play on as always hoping that spending your points on armour has any effect. In this game you hardly see any numbers so it is hard to judge if you got better and by how much.
On to the weapons. They are the normal FPS standard. You have a melee weapon from the start and quickly find some guns till you have sub-machine guns, an assault rifle, a shotgun, a rocket launcher etc. But most of the time you will use only one weapon, two when you have the rocket launcher. One for area attacks and the other for single target damage. that means that most weapons will go unused.
Another aspect of Space Siege are cybernetics. You can upgrade yourself permanently with cybernetic implants which boost some of your attributes and unlocks some new skills. Some weapons also require specific cybernetics to be installed. The downside is that you become less of a human which affects which ending you get.
Speaking of skills, the skill system is like in Diablo, just a lot simpler. There are only two trees, Solder and engineer and skills require you to have specific cybernetics installed while two rather powerful skills require you to be a full (or nearly full) human. You gain skill points at specific points in the game, together with some new abilities unrelated to the skill tree. The problem is that at least to me most skills are useless. The soldier tree nearly only has skills which enhance your melee weapon. But if you rather use guns you don't get much out of it. And while the engineer gadgets are nice in the beginning you don't use them much later in the game. So after I got the essential skills I spend points at random because to get higher level abilities you have to spend a specific number of points on lower level abilities and only very few skills require other skills as prerequisite. And especially when you play as full human you won't have much skills to choose from in the first place.
You are not alone on your mission of murder. Very soon you find a small robot called HR-V which you can customize by a rather little degree. You can upgrade the attributes of HR-V with upgrade points and you can give him one of three weapons, a fast firing weapon, a slow, strong weapon or an area weapon. Still, this guy can become quite powerful and together with you the enemies don't stand much chance. The downside is that the robot uses the same AI as the enemies which is very bad. Very often he or the enemies will idle around while you are in a firefight 3 feet away from the. Luckily you can give him simple commands.
Oh, there are other people in the game but the interaction with them comes down to one sentence and a few cut scenes.
The game itself is very easy. You and HR-V become very powerful in the end and you don't need much skill or tactics to play the game. In the first half of the game you simply throw grenades at enemies and in the second half you activate your shield and fire your rocket launcher till everything is dead. The amount of health packs is limited but ressurection/healing chambers are plentiful. And when you do die you simply respawn except when you are in the final boss fight. HR-V on the other hand has to be rebuild for a small amount of upgrade points. But he keeps all his stats so it isn't much of a hindrance.
During the whole game you will walk through linear levels and occasionally click things in your path when the quest tells you to. Somehow the designers love the number 3 as it are always three things you have to click for a quest. It gets repetitive very soon as the game uses the same setups over and over again. After two times you aren't surprised anymore by enemies hiding under crates and proximity mines placed behind doors and elevators. Still the game tries over and over again.
Then there are a few boss fights in the game. They are all very easy and play all the same. You have a big boss in the middle who at specific points in the game spawns some monsters. And you always fight by walking circles around him so he can't hit you and then activate your shield which makes you invulnerable and fire away. When the shield runs out you start strafing again.
Here you are remembered that Space Siege is a successor of a fantasy game, because every time you kill a boss you perform a finishing move with your armblade on him which makes Conan look like a peasant who barely knows how to hold a sword.
Another big part of the game is the physics engine in connection with explosive stuff (which is everywhere). And it is rather fun, at least in the beginning, to juggle around oxygen bottles and other explosive stuff and push them against enemies. But even that gets dull soon, especially when you become strong enough so you don't need those things anymore to win battles.
And that's all you do till you get the rather anticlimactic ending. The game has multiple endings based on if you have cybernetics installed and on one decision you make in the game, but at least I don't have the slightest interest in playing this game multiple times.
There is also a multiplayer modus which I didn't test, but really I don't see the point. This game is boring. If you want to play such games with others play Diablo 2. Even when you have played this game since its release every day for 8 hours and are able to play it in your sleep you will still find it more enjoyable than Space Siege.
Luckily I just rented the game and you should too if you are really desperate and actually want to touch this game at all.
