Space Siege, is a dungeon crawling, loot gathering space based adventure...but is it any good? Full Review Inside.
The idea of Space Siege was fantastic, take the tried and tested Dungeon Crawler genre and throw in guns, space ships, cybernetics and moral choices and you call it a day. This idea could have made a good game, and as a result prior to release got a lot of hype from the gaming community. Unfortunately the game fell flat on its face very early on.
The team obviously wanted some sort of epic space adventure, emphasizing story and moral dilemmas over anything else. The problem with this is that they leave the combat very unrewarding. This is surprising considering Dungeon Siege (a spiritual prequel) had a very engaging and fun combat system. Add to this the RPG sections are very weak and you have a game the focuses on Story and choices over game play and player progression.
Now, you would be forgiven if you assumed that Space Siege had a good, deep story line to keep you enthralled throughout the experience. Unfortunately you would be wrong. You are introduced into the game with a spine chilling scene of earth being attacked by an Alien race known as the Kerak. You see Earth destroyed and your ship (the Armstrong) escapes the destruction. Obviously a alien pod managed to latch onto the hull and it all goes wrong from there. You play as Seth Walker and Engineer aboard the Armstrong. The Kerak attack and your stuck in the middle. This is a great set up for the story, its chilling and its rather interesting however from here it goes down hill...fast. The story becomes very generic and really bland using just about ever sci-fi cliche know to man.
Your goal in Space Siege is to traverse through the Arm Strong looking for survivors, repairing the ship where needed and killing the endless hordes of Kerak that get in your way. To do this you have a few tools in your engineering belt such as grenades, machine guns and laser swords to name a few. You also come with a variety of skills to help you on your way such as a shock wave to kill near by enemies and a close combat strike that causes heavy damage with your blade. Its all very basic stuff, and its very easy to pull off. The interface is easy to use, and swapping between weapon load outs is a breeze letting you cut down the hordes of aliens from any distance. Whilst exploring the Armstrong you will encounter areas that let you upgrade your weapons and armour in exchange for resources. Resources can be found by killing enemies and you can pull all near by resources to you with a push a button making it easy to gather it all up after a fight. The issue here is that the differences these upgrades make are very minor. I played through the game in the standard setting and found that i very rarely needed to buy any upgrades as none of the enemies were very hard to defeat. The final gimmick in space siege is the moral dilemma system. This is very loosely tied into the story and this lets you add cybernetic modifications to your body to make you more powerful. The downside it is that you lose your humanity. This would have been a really good, game saving feature to the game unfortunately it doesn't work. This is emphasized by the terrible characters you encounter so you just don't care if you lose your humanity, and to be perfectly honest all you care about when playing this game is when will it end, so having the cybernetics is more of an incentive to get the game over with faster than making you ponder on the morals behind it.
Combat is a bit of a mixed bag, like i said, its very easy to fight you enemies and the interface works well and gathering resources is really easy. Unfortunately its way to easy. You stand still, click an enemy blast it with your infinite ammo machine gun and once it explodes move onto the next target. You might use a skill to speed this up a bit. The way the game makes enemies harder is simply giving them more HP, but they still do pitiful damage and are no threat. And even when you take a pounding your health is easily recovered since the game force feeds you health regens. It quickly turns into a repetitive grind, and when you start spamming out on cybernetics it becomes even easier. The game, to its credit does throw in some boss fights but they are just as easy, and just as repetitive as the standard enemies. Now the biggest down side to all of this is that despite all the enemies you kill it makes no difference on your experience. Nope, you level up when the game tells you...its all scripted. You get 2 points to spend to customize your skills with and thats it. This is really bad since there is literally no reward for killing the enemies.
Graphically the game is bland. It has aged moderately well, the frame rate is solid on a decent rig and the physics are especially nice with the game littered with endless gas canisters which fly everywhere when penetrated by a well placed bullet. This was clearly implemented to add some variety to the combat, but it really doesn't work. Enemies walk past the canisters you blow them up and the fight ends that much quicker. I guess thats a good thing with this game. Character design is OK, and the enemy design does do the alien race justice however you rarely notice the little details since there is always a tonne of them on the screen, which again is nice but only adds to the frustration of the game since you really don't want to fight anything. So, to add to the repetitive enemy design comes the repetitive level design. You walk around in bland grey areas that all look fairly similar and it just is not fun to explore.
Sound design is atrocious. Its always in the background and you will forget it is even there when you are playing the game and the voice acting is below average at best.
The game has a multi player mode, however i did not play it and assumed nobody else bothered to either.
Final Verdict? Bland, uninteresting and just full of terrible game designs. The game is just a grind. Your average game length will be about 9 hours, 9 hours of bad story telling, terrible combat, bland leveling up, pointless upgrading and a high degree of not caring about morality. This is such a shame since the idea of the game is solid, but the end result is really poor. You can pick this game up for £1-£2 in some retail stores however dont be tempted. Its just not worth it.
4 out of 10.