I was looking forward to this game. Dungeon Siege in space. Woo-hoo! I mean, I never finished Dungeon Siege, because it tedious and repetitive with precious little story, but it was very well done, smooth interface. Unfortunately, it called attention to how little there was for your brain to do. Dungeon Siege 2 was just as smooth in gameplay, though I didn’t get far in it because even though it did seem richer, it was also pretty much the same shit over and over again. So I’ve been looking forward to what they could do when they advance their techniques even further, and I was thrilled to see them taking it in a science fiction direction.
Near as I can tell from the Demo, Space Siege is less of a game in most ways than even Dungeon Siege 1. While it was charming in Dungeon Siege that your character was working in the fields one day when orcs invaded and stood right up and started whaling on them with her turnip knife and never stopped kicking ass (theoretically until the world is safe, though in practice just until the play can’t stand it anymore). Terrific! In Space Siege, however, you’re clearly already in the millitary so there’s no charm in your sudden injection into the battle between good and evil.
The background story is entirely generic. We went to space, we met hostile aliens. Unless there’s some big reveal later, which the persistent shallowness of the game does not suggest is the case, that’s all the thought they put into the backstory. The opening video, mercy. I’m not a harsh judge of such things, so I was surprised to find myself thinking how lazy and uninspired it was. Thinking about it, I believe I know what other video games do that these guys didn’t bother with in their intro vid – tell a story. Even if it’s not directly connected to the main character, the opening should tell a little story about your world. The opening to Space Siege tells a story about a bunch of game developers who sat around bored with the work they themselves were doing. “Just have a bunch of spaceships zooming around, shooting eachother. Don’t try to figure out what massive damage to a dreadnought would look like. Just assume they managed to cut it neatly in half. Don’t try to figure out what the interior looks like, just put in a maze. Nobody actually gives a shit.”
Before the game’s release, the hooplah was that you had a lot of choices to make about how much humanity to retain. This doesn’t feel like a choice in the game. As soon as you pick up any cyberware, people start yelling at you to install it right away. No one seems to think there’s any kind of consequence, and given how shallow the rest of the game is, probably the worst you can expect is to get chewed out by some NPC later on who will probably work with you anyway.
I don’t know what options you’re supposed to have for character building. Maybe it’s just a limitation of the demo, but you can’t pick the look or the gender of your character. You have skills, but it’s not clear when you get to advance them or how. You can upgrade your equipment, because the aliens you kill turn into “Upgrade Materials” – I believe that was the completely unimaginative term they used. They couldn’t even be bothered with the premise behind the technology, even with the already generic and lazy assumption that everything is nanites. Mass Effect at least actually spent the time explaining their technology. And your equipment came in different brands and quality, requiring you to think about tradeoffs. In Space Siege you just use your “Upgrade Material” to buy your weapon stats outright, completely skipping any possible source of flavor and immersion.
The thing is, if you would enjoy this game despite all this crap, then you can save yourself some money by just buying Space Hack, a space-based Diablo clone already gathering dust in your local retailer’s clearance bin. I’m sick of Diablo clones myself, and yet I found that it grabbed me and pulled me in before the monotonous clickfest kicked in. You actually got to talk to people right from the beginning. You picked up gear that you could compare with the gear you already had, and sell off the inferior bits.
