From Space – Review

The game’s main mechanics are solid. This visual style works well. The music and sound effects are excellent as well. At its heart, this is an enjoyable arcade shooter seen from above.

However, there are a great deal of problems. It needs more time in development. A good game ruined by too much focus on things I normally wouldn’t care about:

The inventory system is cumbersome and difficult to use, making it a nuisance to sort through your belongings and discard the ones you don’t need in order to grab the ones you do. A single grenade occupies the same storage space as ten rolls of razor wire, and so on. To switch out your grenades for something else, you’ll need to pause, open your inventory, navigate to your grenades, and finally, drop the grenades.

The game’s very item usage mechanics are extremely cumbersome. You have two different “item wheels,” one of which is activated by pressing Q, and the other by pressing F. They all have a wide variety of items for various purposes, but only certain ones. For instance, Q was dedicated to mines and razor wire, while F was for grenades and dome shields. In order to switch between items on the F ‘wheel’ and the Q ‘wheel,’ press V for the F ‘wheel’ and C for the Q ‘wheel. Hopefully you won’t forget which “wheel” each item is located on. Nonsense.

Seeing as how *everything* is a kaleidoscope of neon hues, it’s hard to tell who or what to trust. That blue neon circle is a gun, and that other one is a shield; good luck sifting through a pile of 20 to find the one you need.

If not for all of the visual noise, the majority of the environment and background would be much darker and less interesting. I died several times because I couldn’t see that hydrants, bicycles, and a child’s waggon were actually solid walls that blended into the background.

What’s more, if the bullets from various firearms are different colours, it only serves to further confound matters. Including some in the enemy colour purple.

Without actually handling a perk, there is no way to know what it is. Even items and guns aren’t immune as they can be visually difficult to see in a pile of loot and then you can’t tell what they are without picking them up. Furthermore, you won’t be able to because the items despise you. After releasing one perk in order to acquire another, you check your inventory and discover the new perk is useless, at which point you release it and reclaim the first. Overall, a poor design.

Nothing truly differentiates harmful effects from benign ones. Those blobs of pinkish colour on the floor are completely safe to walk on. The green ones, on the other hand, are quite perilous.

Furthermore, the term “friendly fire” is used quite literally in this game. Real flames, blasts, grenades, lightning, and rockets can all be added to the pile of potentially dangerous colour vomit.

In addition, it takes some practise to learn to recognise your enemies. Whoever decided that the aliens should all look like pink neon boxes has no idea how challenging it is to distinguish between enemies in a game like this when they all share such fundamental similarities.

Many of the hitboxes are completely off. To represent an enemy crashing through the air and into you, a quarter of the screen is depicted as a shattered window. This is problematic because teleporting enemies will almost always hit no matter what you do in response to their teleportation.

But it’s a relief that every AI system is so terrible. The fact that most of the enemies are variations on “moves toward players and attacks” and there are relatively few ranged enemies is frustrating because it causes it to get stuck frequently.

With all of these factors combined, the game’s visuals are a complete mess. All of the explosions, gunfire, loot, enemies, coloured players/markers, mission markers, and your tiny white crosshair can be on the screen at once. It’s impossible to remember even the most crucial details, let alone everything.

An identical green experience bar mirrors the visible HP bar, which is hidden in the top left corner of the screen. Try to estimate how often you will be fooled by a quick glance and think one bar is the other.

As for collecting currency from enemies, a terrible system of “whoever is closest to the kill gets the reward” is in place. Therefore, those who are safe from close combat with their enemies can enjoy their poverty.

Given that you only gain access to a specialist’s full capabilities by playing as them, there is no real way to “try out” the different specialists. You don’t even get their signature weapon until a few levels so if you don’t like how that sniper rife feels tough luck start back at 0. When switching specialists, you have to drop all of your equipment and weapons.

Overall, there is a lack of variety in the form of unique enemies, missions, and firearms. The wide variety of missions is a standout feature. Missions involving area control, beacon destruction, and npc escort share a lot of common ground. It’s complete with a moronic artificial intelligence npc.

You can get stuck anywhere, climb up on things that weren’t meant to be climbed on, and even manage to get someone trapped in a place from which they can’t escape without dying twice.

There are numerous bugs to discuss. You may become ‘dashing’ stuck as you move, preventing you from reloading or doing anything else. When multiple people pull the same trigger, or very close to it, strange things can happen. And there’s damage from unknown sources happening in places where nobody should be in danger. Only the ones I can think of off the top of my head will do.

When a new enemy is encountered, a cinematic introduction in the style of the Borderlands game stops play temporarily. wrecked the game’s pacing then, and it does now.

New screens with information appear without pausing the game, sometimes at inconvenient times. When you’re about to die, a screen may appear with instructions on how to complete a few crucial objectives, and you’ll have to press and hold E for a full second to dismiss it. You need to read that information, but it’s on the screen, which is distracting you from staying alive. This is unacceptable from a ‘completed game’. It’s totally unacceptable.

On that note, very few accessibility options. There appears to be no way to disable the tutorial prompts. There is no way to adjust the sights. There is no way to modify the interface or the font size. I can’t even fathom trying to play this if my eyesight is poor.

The save system in the game is archaic. You have save spots that your entire team has to be near to save at. In addition, reloading from a save rather than a specific location is what happens when you die. Additionally, these safe zones are the only locations where you can reliably find these save points. Consequently, the group often has to pause the game to go back and save at regular intervals.

No public lobby. While not really a problem for me personally since I wouldn’t play without friends anyway, is definitely an overall issue worth addressing.