[rwp-review id=”0″]
This game is in early access and is subject to improvement.
Space, the final frontier. Words from the famous captain of the Enterprise, James T. Kirk, who my friends keep trying to convince me isn’t real. The possibilities that space offers has always inspired an avid fascination amongst us earthbound humans. It’s mysterious by nature and humans have a habit of poking at things until they understand them inside out, as a result, a flood of science fiction comics, movies and games have been produced and consumed to sate our imagination.
Cosmonautica, an early access game on Steam, is a product of this system.
Rather than focusing solely on guns, lasers and a Michael Bay proportion of explosives or attempting to emulate a modern day Christopher Columbus by going down the explorer’s path, Cosmonautica grabs a bit from each category and throws in some more to give you a fresh look at a spaceship related game. Here’s what I think of this early access game.
Cosmonautica is first and foremost a micromanaging game. When you load up a new campaign for the first time, you’re given a rusty old spaceship to be the captain of with your first task being to populate it with a crew. You have your pilots, weapons masters, cooks, medical officers, repairers and cleaners to name a few. But no two pilots are the same, in fact in the 14 hours I spent in game, I never found two NPCs who were exactly the same, so diverse were their interests, names and levels. What one pilot found interesting was the subject of a passionate hatred from a cook down in the bowels of the ship. Now the reason I describe this game as a micromanaging sim is due to the needs of each of your crew members. You have the basics: hunger, sleep and hygiene. I’m ashamed to say that I forgot to install a restroom in one of my ships, resulting in severely cross crewmembers who suffered from induced constipation and who looked as if they wanted to defecate on my face. But as your crewmembers level up, they gain new interests and wants. It’s up to you to ensure that the facilities needed are installed in your ship, that crewmembers have enough leisure time to use those facilities and that the general morale of the crew is high, for if not, you might have to walk the proverbial plank, or in this case, airlock. Oh and did I have to mention that you have to pay your crew? Yeah, servitude isn’t what it used to be. But if you do manage to accommodate the wishes of your crew and keep them happy, or in the region of, some crew members acquire the “on fire” status, turning them into efficient robots who require barely if any leisure time, preferring to instead work away at their task as the stars whiz past.
To guide you through the entire process of getting to grips with the game is an AI called NIL, who acts as the games narrator for it’s story. The story itself isn’t very enthralling, it instead feels more or less like a tutorial to the game rather than an actual functioning story. The pace is very off as well, at times I was several steps ahead of where the story thought I would be, and I was often asked to research a certain upgrade I had procured ages ago.
Visually, the game is pleasant to the eyes, there aren’t any breathtaking, stunning panoramas but neither is it the work of a child’s crayoning. The rustic look of your spaceship is something you fall in love with as you begin to understand the complexities of efficiently running a ship.
One of the first things you need is a science lab and a scientist to research the upgrades you require to not be consumed by the vastness of space and all its dangers. Your scientist will only research when your ship is travelling between ports, preferring to spend his or her time at a port clubbing or exercising. However, a few hours into the game and I realised I had researched everything ship related, which is often all that matters. Yes you can still research about other solar systems but unless asked for by the main quest, I left this branch uncharted for it wasn’t rewarding.
Now while your crew is happily lounging around in the strop club you installed in your ship or threatening to smear fecal matter over your windshields, you’ll have to send your ship from planet to planet, either trading goods or picking up quests and missions, all for the sake of balancing your checkbook. I must say, the difficulty curve in this game is rather steep; an hour in and I was doing my best to not go bankrupt and as a result I was diminished to a sweating, shaking mess for the next three hours or so before I figured an efficient way to earn the big ones. Suffice to say I was etchy, there were times when I yelled at the planet Xeron for not buying the burgers I brought all the way from one of the outer rim planets, burgers I may add, that I had to fight space pirates for.
The combat system itself is… “interesting” would be a polite word. It’s based in real time, where the result of the fight depends on many factors. The level of your weapons masters matters a lot; it determines the range of the three different types of weapons (Turrets, Cannons and Missiles) as well as their accuracy. If you have a scientist, he would normally be put to work to power the shield system on your ship and your hackers would be trying to bring down the enemies weapons, navigation or shield systems. But none of these are automatic actions. You yourself have to constantly check and activate your shield when missiles are incoming, make sure your hacker is bringing down the correct system for the situation and manually shoot your weapons, (only one of which homes in on the enemy). As a result a certain repetitiveness lends itself to your actions and makes combat feel turn-based, blunting away at the fierceness you would come to expect from a battle in space. What’s more, taking on missions that require you to engage in battle often aren’t incredibly rewarding in nature; I could just about break even after a fight, having spent my reward on repairing the hull and restocking my weapons caches. If you abhor violence and are a pacifist you could also negotiate with pirates, giving them goods or money as tribute, instead of engaging in a brawl.
Luckily, combat missions are the only mishap when it comes to the overall quest system. Transporting goods, such as burgers or computers, or people, whether they be a crew of explorers or a squad of mercenaries, are rewarding and one of the best ways to turn a profit in the game, so long as you get to the destination quickly enough. Smuggling and missions associated with it are a very interesting concept in the game and plays on the uniqueness of each planet, in each system. To successfully smuggle goods, you’d have to upgrade your storage units, have your hackers fool the detection systems and even bribe the customs officer, but none of these by itself, or even all of them together will guarantee your trafficking of illicit materials goes undetected and unpunished. If you find yourself on the pointy end of the stick, you may be banned from that planet for a number of “cycles”, cutting off a valuable cash generator. Penalising in the quest system only happens if you don’t complete the mission in time, which is difficult to much up since a decent window of time is allotted per mission.
Overall, Cosmonautica’s diverse range of planets, NPCs and missions make it an incredibly refreshing new variant in a genre that’s cluttered with games that focus too narrowly down a single path. The micromanaging required to succeed in the game is akin to that of the Sims and provides a challenging aspect to Cosmonautica, after all we wouldn’t want crew members to defecate all over the spaceship. However, the bland storyline, difficulty curve and repetitive combat are big low points of the game but it should be noted that the game is still in early access and as a result new features are being implemented with every update with old ones being polished.
