cantstraferight [Insert funny here]
Joined: Jan 16, 2007
Posts: 1410
Post Subject: Space Siege
Posted on: Sep 24, 2008
Space Siege is top down action/role-playing game developed by Chris Taylor (creator of Total Annihilation, Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander) You play as Seth Walker a member of the Allied Security Force that has a interest in robots. Seth is on board the colony ship, The Armstrong and there's a good chance that The Armstrong contains all that's left of humanity after an alien race known as the Kerak hunted down and wiped out all humanity. The game begins with the Armstrong escaping from the Kerak fleet but not before the aliens attach a battle pod full of Kerak solider to the hull of your ship. Overall the plot isnt great, its got a lot of clichés, some of the twists in the story are too predictable and there are holes in the plot big enough for for the Armstrong to fly through but some may argue that its supposed to be that way and your not to take the plot to seriously.
Space Siege plays a bit like top down RPG's like Diablo and Neverwinter Nights but the addition of guns makes the game much more of a action game with the RPG parts stuck on. As you kill enemies they leave behind generic parts that can be used for a wide variety of things like upgrading Seth's and his weapons stats or making supplies like medkits, grenades and sentry guns.
Your not alone as you fight your way through swarms of enemies, early in the game you come across robot known as HR-V (pronounced Harvey) and use it to help you in your mission to wipe out the Kerak on board the ship. HR-V just like Seth can be upgraded using parts collected from dead enemies and if HR-V gets destroyed you can bring him (or it) back to life using parts. I found trying to control HR-V a waste of time that could be better spent controlling Seth while HR-V takes most of the enemy fire giving seth the extra time needed to kill the enemies.
Most missions thought the game involve going from point A to point B killing everything in your path followed by walking back to point A. The swarms of enemies never seem to slow you down but trying to find the way to point B using in-game map can make the levels take a lot longer than they should. The map has multiple problems but the worst is that it will display objectives even if they aren't on the same floor you are, which means that you can often find yourself thin an empty room wondering where the objective is only to realise that its on the floor above or below you and unfortunately the map doesn't display where elevators are so your only option is to search every inch of every room trying to find the where you are supposed to go. Once you've done what ever is needed at point B your trip back to point A is so easy because enemies don't respawn that it leaves you wondering why you are constantly forced to make the trip back.
One of the biggest parts of the game is choosing whether or not you want to replace your body parts with cybernetic parts to make yourself better at the cost of your humanity. At the end of the day the abilities you gain through cybernetics aren't that amazing and probably wont affect the way you play through the game. In fact most of the abilities in the game aren't that useful or amazing so most of the time you rely on your gun and 4 or 5 of the many abilities at your disposal. The whole cybernetics V.S. humanity dilemma felt like the game tried to recreate the little sisters dilemma from last years Bioshock but unfortunately you don't really care about humanity level until all that's still human is Seth's left elbow and by then its too late to do anything.
There are a total of three different endings so that if you enjoyed playing through the game there is a reason to play again. Some of the abilities can only be access if you spend most of your experience points in a certain area of the tech tree so your not going to see these abilities on your first play through but their not that interesting and don't effect the game greatly like you feel they should.
The controls are probably the worst thing about the game. You control Seth by clicking on where you want him to go or what you want him to use/attack, this works perfectly. When you hold the mouse button down you expect him to follow the cursor but what he does can be fairly random, sometimes he will follow the cursor perfectly other times he just walks in a straight line and sometimes he just stopped walking for no reason.
Abilities are controlled through the 1-0 keys and HR-V's abilities are controlled through the F keys. At times I found this to be annoying and there wasn't a lot of abilities I used so in the end I re-mapped all the abilities I found to be useful to the 1-5 keys and
Space Siege sits between being a shooter and being a RPG but it doesn't do either very well and will disappoint hard core fans of both genres. Even if you look past its problems its still just an average game that at most your only going to play through once. If your looking for a game to play over a weekend and you can find it for a budget price then its worth giving it a go but don't expect a game that you can play for more than a week and still not be bored of.
