Starmancer Early access

 It's a start, certainly.

Up there amidst the endless black, around blinking quasars and drooping nebulae, drifts a single lone entity, a derelict space station; inhabits being a single lonely AI and an Ark full of human DNA to clone and do with as it pleases. There, in the simpliest nutshell imaginable, is my explanation for what Starmancer promises to the player, and probably what drew me in those past two years ago when I happened across it. Seems I have an eye for these Star-based products that are spawned in early access with wild dreams and a song in their hearts. I remember another story I came across was that of Starbound, a side-scrolling building adventure game set in space that seemed to be trying to be the 'next step up' from Terraria, but never quite seemed to nail the execution. When last I played it, Starbound was slowly receiving new modes and systems that didn't really effect the core experience all that much, and then the team just went silent. (Presumably to move on to bigger and better things) So I'll coming into the early access field I am a little cautious, I haven't be burned as bad as some others (Starbound's final version is still a great game I've spent 100 of hours with) but now I know that even success-bound projects can have their final ultimate drawbacks.

Thus Starmancer would have had to do something really special to get my attention, no? Well, they let me play the thing, and that actually helped a great deal in deciding if this was worth my time. Yes, back when Steam did their 'Summer of play demos for upcoming games', Starmancer was one of the games that went for the bait, and even with the hour-or-so I had with the game I could tell it was the sort of thing I'd love. Born from the genre of games that bought us Dwarf Fortress and Dungeon Keeper, Starmancer is the sort of game about managing clones of humans to build and sustain a space station whilst dealing with the basics like making sure the oxygen is running, wiring up and then keeping power systems connected, ensuring that rooms don't freeze their occupants to death, and maybe fending off the odd Space zombie that winds up on your station. It was pure sandbox, very intuitive, and sported a totally gorgeous flat pixel aesthetic that rotated perfectly to always face the camera. How could I not fall in love?

From there I did learn that the game was made by only 2 people, which came with it's own share of optimism and worries. On the most obvious half of things, it's only two people: How can you expect the best outcome from that? Most sandbox games take entire dedicated teams of people who live and breathe their game to come together in a coherent way, but Starmancer expects to sail by on a tiny team like that? But then I find myself thinking to Stardew Valley, a fantastic and great game, which was born from but one person. Kenshi, a labour of love from a single man. Don't Starve, Bastion, Super Meat Boy, Cuphead; sometimes it just takes someone who really cares about the genre they're working with in order to nail the execution on a game. Give them the time and enough materials and they will build that game they promise, they're passion driven. Of course, such projects need the right two people working on them, but confidence is an apt shield to hide behind when I ponder how anyone could start a project with this much passion and not be dedicated? (Blind optimism? You betcha!)

In the time since then I've been trying to keep uncharacteristically out of the affairs of the game itself so that I might gauge the game fresh when it arrives, whenever that may be. I kept an ear out, but turned my attentions elsewhere, hoping onto the Steam page every few months and so to make sure there wasn't any 'surprise announcement' that I would have missed out on simply by having my attentions elsewhere. But as it just so happens I needn't have bothered. A game that was revealed during an E3 event was hardly going to miss dropping that release date outside of E3, and I whooped in giddily surprise when I saw that title make it's surprise drop-by with that news I was waiting for. Finally I would have the chance to see the game that blossomed out of that promising demo. And so needless to say, I picked up Starmancer Day 1, something I hadn't done since Persona 4 Golden on PC. But have I fallen quite so hardly in love as I did with Persona?

Not yet, truth be told. Not even nearly. Whilst the game did live up to everything I saw in that first demo and a little bit more, it hasn't really ballooned into a game with a solid direction to it yet, and that's something you feel right from the get-go. Yes, there's a threadbare story that acts like a tutorial, but when it comes to the main gameplay loop of building your base, there's no endgame state to shoot for. Which makes sense how everything wouldn't be laid out yet, of course, this game released in early access; but I'm just having trouble seeing the vision I'm supposed to be excited for. As it is I've played less than 10 hours and am having trouble really seeing what to keep coming back to the game for. I mean I love the art, and building up by station with the necessary systems and trip breakers so that one mistake doesn't cripple the whole base is pretty fun; but where's my draw? I'm waiting for that to be answered with bated breath, and a little bit of crossed fingers too. 

Aside from the basic, yet functional nature of the game, is a lot of non-functionality as well; meaning bugs, bugs, bugs galore. Or at least that's what I'm told, as a vast majority of the horrific issues that have been crippling people's ability to enjoy this game on even the most basic level have totally flown past me. I guess I'm just lucky. Reports have come out of the game crashing all over the place, AI falling apart, leaving the airlock without putting on a spacesuit. (I actually did spot that happening once. But it wasn't as funny as that sounds, the guy just went about his business as though he was equipped) I've seen, at worst, a bug where a power-draining insect couldn't be engaged by my crew, and so it kept draining power for days without being touched until I literally just re-routed the system around the damn thing. My issues are more fundamental, such as how the ice-mining system is supposed to work beyond just dumping ice on the ground and waiting for it to dethaw, or how specific jobs are meant to be assigned beyond just setting 'priorities' and praying the game picks up what you want them to do.

What concerns me right now isn't the idea that this game will need to improve, that much is obvious and I have the patience to wait and see this flower blossom, it's more what future a game like this could shoot for, because I'm not overly familiar with the genre in question. The roadmap has some details upon it such as adding factions and tools of defence, will will certainly work towards fleshing out the world and adding purpose to building in defending from the outside, but I feel like these sorts of games benefit from having internal goals too, not to keep things complicated but to motivate the player beyond "I need to keep living because if I don't then I won't be alive anymore." I was personally thinking of something that leaned into the 'evil AI' concept a bit more, like perhaps some advanced shady research you could trick your crew into working towards, like advanced genetic research to grow up some abominations. Just real messed-up stuff like that to keep the players invested in something other than constant expansion and defence. (But I'm talking literal end-of-development, 1.0, stuff here, for now we could use something just basic and simpler for the health of the game)

As with any Early Access title, jumping on right now is starting on the road to a finished product and not buying one outright, so going in expecting a totally fleshed-out experience is really just setting oneself up for disaster. For a sandbox, however, I would envision just a little more in the realms of replayability at this stage, and lacking that does encourage an eyebrow raised, if not genuine concern being seeded. But a smaller, indie game, that doesn't even cost a whole lot; I'm willing to give a lot of wiggle room and jump back on the game from time to time to see if I can't make my own fun with messing around and punking my space crew, the way that any self-respecting AI would. But would I recommend jumping into Starmancer at this stage? Not especially, unless you'll happy to support a small team and want to see the best out of them, because the product in question might not be worth the price of admission alone, at least not yet. I will be keeping myself, and maybe even this blog, updated however; I'm sticking till the end with this one.

I played the Resident Evil 3 Remake

Welcome to Raccoon City, Population: shrinking every day!

That's right, I've finally had the chance to play the story of the mythical 5th survivor of the Raccoon city incident. (Or would that be 6th. Are we counting Ms. Wong?) Pretty much from the moment the game went live to right now as I sit down to write this I've been surviving the end of the civilised world as we know it, and playing Resident Evil 3. (Hah, Jokes!) Although I've not really made nearly enough progress to start with a play-by-play analysis or anything, I do want to put up something to the effect about how much I'm enjoying things so far. If you've happened on this with any intention to play the game, however, I will warn you that there's going to mild spoilers for the intro and the first area of the game. (I just needed to provide examples for how well Capcom have got me in the right mood so far.)

Firstly, however, I need to complain for something I take personal offence to. I started my playthrough on Hardcore, as I do in just about every game I play, only to spot that in the listed details of this mode there was no bulletpoint for typewriters to require Ink ribbons. For those that are unaware, back in old-school Resident Evil (and the Hardcore mode for the Resident Evil 2 Remake) there was a mechanic wherein the amount of saves one could make was limited to the number of ink ribbons they could procure. This was arguably one of the purest expressions of the survival horror genre and one of my favourite aspect of Resident Evil as it made death matter. Unfortunately this doesn't appear to be the case with RE3, and I think I know why. After playing through the game a bit I've noticed how the pace of the game is several times that of the last title, and as a such inventory management takes a bit of a backseat to all the action. Adding Ink ribbons to the environment would really grind the title down to a halt and require extra amounts of supply runs, and even though that would technically be an optional obligation that the player took on, some folks would look upon that as bad design. (Fie on them, I say; I love that backtracking lifestyle!) So I may not like it but I understand it.

But if something I enjoyed had to be sacrificed for pacing reasons, then I'm at least glad it went to such a high-octane opening. The first few minutes of Resident Evil 3 honestly bought back memories of the first time I played 'Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain' for the amount of chaos happening around you as you're still learning your footing. Hell, Nemesis is literally one of the first things that you see and he's happy to toss you out of a window if you don't wise up and match the speed that events are being hurled at you. It's quite the polar opposite to the slow build of Resident Evil 2, that went so far as to give you the perspective of a nobody eating a hamburger in it's first scene just to hammer home the crawling pace. This is a title that clearly wants to waste no time and pretty much expects you to be familiar with last year's Resident Evil 2. So if you haven't pulled the trigger on that title yet you should. (Seriously, what are you waiting for?)

As a fan of the franchise, it's practically my duty to talk about some minimal little moments that tickled my lore bone. One of the first of these moments was actually right at the beginning when we finally got a glimpse of Jill's PTSD as a result of the original title. (During which she fought zombies, giant snakes, and a whole bunch of other things that I'm not going to talk about because I haven't mentioned them in my blog series yet.) For the first time in the entire franchise (as far as I'm aware) we are getting to see real world consequences for the horrific crap that this series puts it's characters through, and I love this more serious direction the series is taking. (For the most part; but I won't keep griping on small thing until I've seen the whole picture.)

In terms of rapid narrative, I'll admit I am surprised how quickly the game has evolved as I've played it. Within an hour I went from being a no ammo scrub to having a maxed out pistol, buttstocked Shotgun and two hip pouch upgrades; and this is on my very first playthrough of this game! It all really hammers home the 'action first' design philosophy that I think took precedent for RE3. You'll also find yourself practically inundated with pistol ammo in a semi-regular fashion which makes it all the more likely that you'll find yourself spending round in the hordes you'll have thrown at you. (And there are hordes! Loads of them.) You can even find this concept realised in a much more practical way through how many environmental take-down methods you'll see littered around the map; from explosive barrels to portable generators.

Another thing I've noticed is how a relatively miniature system change for the character controls has had attributed to such a drastic change in the way I play the game, and that's the removal of defence items in favour for a dodge button. In Resident Evil 2 when you were in a situation FUBAR you basically had to do an equation in your head about which resources you were willing to expend in order to get out the otherside. When there was a huge Adult G in front of you, you had to know whether or not you could bring it down or if you had to go spending a knife in order to boss your way past them in the following struggle. In this title is all comes down to either shooting them down or getting abnormally good at timing, because you need your dodge reflexes to be impeccable. If there's a crowd of Z in front of you, you better hope you can pull of 2 to 3 last second dodges or you're getting munched on. It's one way that the consequences mount a lot more upon your head the moment that you let things slip, building tension is quite a visceral manner.

But I can't go any longer without talking about Nemesis because good lord is that guy just a nutcase. I remember how his entire reputation from the original title was built around being this unstoppable machine but this title brings that to a whole new level. Not only does Nemesis never stay down, he doesn't even go down for long. The amount of times that the characters throw hell at this beast only for him to be kicking in the next few minutes is absurd, even William for RE2 had to limit his surprise resurgences to once an Act. Honestly, I do not know why Umbrella kept up their BOW research after coming out with this guy, he is literally the perfect Bio-Weapon: you did it team! At this point I'm starting to suspect that the only way to bring the guy down will literally be to strand him in Raccoon city once the nuke drops, and even then I'm only 70% sure that'll be enough.

There's a lot of cool unexpected encounters in the game so far, including one section which Jill so aptly labels: "F-ing gross", but I don't want to spoil any of them on day one. So far I'm loving this chaotic look into the crumbling world of Raccoon City almost as much as I'm enjoying those brief moments where we get to return to locations from the original Resident Evil 2. This will probably be my last dedicated blog on Resident Evil 3 for a while (my schedule for this month of blogs is literally full) but take my whole hearted recommendation for the first third of RE3 if nothing else. (I might jump the order and do a mini-review by the end, not sure yet.)

Inner look at The Outer Worlds

Remember; whatever happens out here, it's your fault.

I created this punny title months ago with the intention of doing an in-depth analysis of the, then newly released, Outer Worlds trailer. Yet for whatever reason, apathy or lethargy, I never got around to covering it. I just couldn't justify the reviewing of a trailer for a title that I just couldn't get myself excited for. Now I don't need to, as the game is out and I have been playing it practically non stop since release. As such this blog has evolved from a analysis to an early impressions. So let's impress. (Wait...)

Firstly, you might be wondering; "What would bring you to pre-order and binge a game that you have stated, multiple times in fact, does not interest you?" Well a couple of factors have played into that, one of which being the realization that I had been treating the game unfairly and judging it for what it wasn't instead of what it was. (An easy mistake to make as an amateur pundit.) More influential to my decision, however, were the actions of their closet competitor. I know that the folks at Obsidian would be the first one's to talk about their positive working relationship with Bethesda, but that doesn't shake the fact that an immersion-specific 50's-esque action RPG automatically sets itself in direct competition with Bethesda's Fallout. With that in mind, it should hardly be surprising to read that Bethesda's blunderous decisions of late have driven me, not just to keep my money far away from them, but to redirect that money to Obsidian's pockets. Call it my little form of protest.

On the bright side, this means that I have been able to jump into The Outer Worlds fresh faced and ready. With that unlaboured perspective, I could become concerned about the versatility of combat without becoming clouded my uninformed preconceptions. To be clear, I played the game on the highest difficulty below Supernova (For reasons I'll explain later) and what I found was that the beginning areas were actually incredibly easy to breeze through. Luckily, my experiences with the later game has proved that things can start to escalate, I even had to start employing rudimentary tactics against these darn Mantiqueens. So perhaps that particular concern is unfounded, I suppose I'll find out as I continue through.

Besides from my concerns with combat, The Outer Worlds has significantly surprised me as being an action RPG game that takes it's RPG routes to heart more than any other example of the genre. What I mean by this, is often you'll find that 'Action RPG's' tend to ditch a lot of traditional RPG mechanics in order to streamline the gameplay. Your player character may be susceptible to a few negative status effects, but the bulk load is meant for enemies. You may have put all of your points into offensive stats, but you still posses the ability to perform a basic set of rolls and dodges. As you can likely deduce from be bringing this up in the first place, The Outer Worlds dances to it's own tune in this regard. You will find your self juggling with status effects, threating over which limb you need to cripple on what enemy to make it through this fight, or just discovering how basic gameplay features need to be unlocked to be enjoyed. (It took until hour 10 for me to realize that companion abilities are locked behind you having 20 points in leadership.)

They take this to the extreme with Supernova difficulty, which is meant to be a stand in for a 'survival mode'. And before you moan, I would like to remind you that Obsidian were the one's responsible for implementing New Vegas' survival mode, which is the industry gold standard for such modes. In Supernova, you are much more susceptible to debuffs and must maintain your food and sleep in order to shake some of them. However, sleep is limited to only being possible on your own ship, meaning one has to be tactical with their mission choices. Likewise, you can only manually save the game on your ship and are beholden to limited autosaves whilst off your ship, making the prospect of dying all the more tense. Honestly, I would have jumped into this mode off-the-bat if it wasn't for the saving restriction. I needed to ensure that I knew the game inside and out before I committed to something like that.

I do owe this game, and the Devs, an apology for one conclusion that I came to during the promotional period of this game. Namely, that this seemed like a cheap imitation of Borderlands in it's humor and setting. Admittedly, I don't think the game put it's best foot forward with that first trailer, but it's hard to convey the dry wit that the writing champions without explicit context, so I'll forgive them for that. As to the setting of the game, this was one assumption that I was completely off-base on. Borderlands' world is defined by chaos, and even though they joke about the ruling hand of the corporations over people's lives, it never feels like a concept driven to it's extreme. The Outer Worlds' one the otherhand, absolutely does drive that concept to it's extreme, by having the entire Halcyon colony be literally ruled by the different companies who bought the system. In this world, every aspect of your life is corporate mandated or shaped through targeted commercialism, making life there a bureaucratic nightmare. It is a fascinating concept that could so easily be squandered if the writing team lacked the talent of Obsidian's. Everytime you come across a terminal entry with cooperate spiel that you feel tempted to skim through (As you would in a Fallout game) you always give it a look through and get a wry smile out of the subtle jokes here and there.

All of these aspects come together to form a game that was quite unlike what I was expecting. In the beginning, I though we would be getting a Fallout-esque game. Indeed, many of the impressions that you scroll past on the Internet right now will, rather lazily, title themselves 'Fallout in Space.' (The Dark Souls of review titles, one might say.) What I found, however, was something more akin to Firefly in tone and a traditional Bioware game in content. The slight tactical edge to combat, the communication/quest based friendships with your companions, the heavy 'RPG' edge, all of this makes me think that this is what Bioware could have been if they hadn't sold their creative soul to EA.

That is all I have to say about The Outer Worlds presently, I intend to only start a full review once I've beasted through on Supernova, so don't expect anything soon. I am enjoying the game a lot right now, and believe that it has the potential to become a favourite depending on how the story and gameplay plays out as I get further on. I will say, however, that I'm concerned as to how much legs this concept has. I know Obsidian have talked about The Outer Worlds potentially starting a new franchise, but the whole 'space cowboys versus the cooperations' thing doesn't really feel like it invites a slew of new stories. I'm just not sure that the game's universe is large enough to support a franchise. Then again, one could have said the same for the first Fallout game, and that series went on for twenty years before Bethesda murdered it. I suppose we shall see how things play out for Obsidian in the future, and if this game is successful enough to warrant a sequel.