2095: Exploring Space

I’m starting to get a bit interested in Elite Dangerous after chatting about it with a friend the other night. It sounds like the ongoing, active development of the game is starting to pay off a bit with some actual Stuff to Do, albeit Stuff that gets a bit repetitive after a while, from what I understand. There’s a great deal of potential there, however, and with the status of Star Citizen a little uncertain, Elite Dangerous is starting to look a little more like the “safe” choice for next-gen space opera action.

I’m a little loathe to pay full price for Elite Dangerous at this point, however, since the thing I’m particularly interested in — the Horizons expansion, which adds planetary landings to the mix — costs about the same as the base game of Elite Dangerous and, in fact, comes with a copy of Elite Dangerous included, too, meaning that if you want to play Elite Dangerous now and enjoy Horizons when it comes out, you effectively have to pay for it twice, which is a bit poo, but that’s not what I’m going to get into today.

Anyway. The point is, while I was looking at Elite Dangerous and willing the price to magically drop by itself, I spotted some “related” games on Steam that looked intriguing. One in particular caught my eye: Rodina. I became even more interested in this after reading a user review that compared it favourably to 16-bit classics Starglider and Damocles, so I decided to check out the free demo this evening.

Rodina is a game that prides itself on seamless exploration. And for once, that isn’t an exaggeration: you start the game on foot on an asteroid, follow a signal to find your spaceship, hop into your spaceship, wander around inside your spaceship, take off, fly around the asteroid, find some bits to make your spaceship better, take off again, leave the asteroid, start flying around the solar system and start investigating planets for a mysterious alien menace that appears to have thwarted humanity’s attempts to colonise the stars.

Rodina is technically in Early Access at the moment, but it is possible to “finish” it already, apparently, by seeing through the whole story. The story is primarily told through text boxes that appear through a combination of messages you receive on your ship’s communication system and data crystals you find scattered around on the various stellar bodies around the solar system. It’s an intriguing little tale with some good writing, though seeing interactions between people depicted through this rather cold medium makes the game itself feel like a rather lonely experience — doubtless intentional.

The premise is intriguing enough, to be sure. The execution… well, it’s difficult to make a fully informed judgement based on just an hour of the demo — take note, Mike Diver of Vice and your atrocious Senran Kagura 2 review, no I haven’t forgotten about you — but I have mixed feelings so far. On the one hand, it’s cool to see a game with such a great sense of scale; the solar system in which the game unfolds feels big, and stellar bodies feel like more than bitmaps you fly towards until they suddenly, magically become a 3D planet surface. There’s a cool atmospheric re-entry system where you have to wrestle with your ship’s controls as you descend, and successfully popping out of the bottom of this is always a satisfying moment.

Trouble is, like many games of this type, the scenery is a little bit bland, or at least it has been in what I’ve seen so far. Everything, be it planet or asteroid, appears to be variations on “coloured ground with procedurally generated mountains”; there aren’t any real geographical features to speak of, so don’t expect something like No Man’s Sky from this. This takes a little bit of the fun out of the exploration; a key part of space exploration simulators — and what I’m hoping Elite Dangerous: Horizons will nail later in the year — is allowing you to discover all manner of weird and wonderful things around the galaxy. Rodina has plenty of things to discover, for sure, but for one thing, they’re all signposted with waypoints when you get close enough, and secondly, everything I’ve discovered so far has been nothing more than a few randomly scattered crates and barrels and one or two data crystals. While the story these apparent crash sites was revealing was interesting, by the end of the demo it was already starting to get a little bit tiresome to track down these logs.

There’s a lot of potential, for sure, and just as I was finishing the demo, the game was starting to open up a bit, suggesting that I travel to the actual planets in the system to deal with the alien menace rather than just finding log after log. It sounds as if at the present time, there aren’t really any friendly NPCs to interact with, which is a shame, but it’s something the developer intends to include in the future.

I’m not sure I liked the demo enough to want to drop 11 quid on the full game just yet, but it’s certainly an intriguing little game with a great deal of potential that I’ll probably keep my eye on to see how it develops. I’m all for more space games, since we’ve been deprived of them for a good few years; hopefully this is the beginning of a renaissance.