The latest RPG from Gas Powered Games is a repetitive shoot 'em up that ultimately disappoints.
Gas Powered Games' Space Siege is like a worst-case scenario for alien contact. Earth's first bold ventures into space result in an encounter with the hostile alien species known as the Kerak. After a massive attack on Earth, your colony ship is boarded and under siege, setting the scene for one robotics expert's quest to cleanse the decks of this foreign menace. The storyline isn't the only worst-case scenario at work here: Space Siege is a strictly by-the-numbers approach to linear, lifeless, yawn-inducing gameplay.
Set Phasers to Snooze
While Space Siege is technically an action-RPG, the hallmarks of the genre are not explored to their fullest. Deep character customization, a rich storyline, action-packed combat... you'll find little of that here. The game railroads you from dull-gray hall to dull-gray hall, with no real sense of exploration. Rooms are locked and ancillary areas are completely sealed off until you complete the objectives, sending you from Point A to Point B with no room for even the slightest deviation. Each mini-level is a journey from one bland, enemy-filled room to the next, with very few changes in scenery or opposition to mix things up. Even after playing the game for hours, you'll still feel like you're in the first level.
The gameplay is similarly rudimentary. Combat in Space Siege is boiled down to holding down the right mouse button over enemies to shoot, and clicking to the side in order to dodge slow-moving projectiles. You have a defensive dodge move, but that only rolls you forward, often into the projectiles that you were hoping to avoid. You can't move and shoot at the same time, so there's no possibility for exciting run-and-shoot action. Just shoot the explosive crates and barrels that litter the entire ship, blast enemies, and click abilities for extra damage, to toss grenades, or to release drones. It's like this from the start of the game to the very end.
The enemies are remarkably dumb as well. They'll stand and shoot at you, neglecting opportunities to use cover or tactics. Every room can be easily handled by just shooting them in order of proximity. You can manage your robot companion's attacks and abilities, but leaving it to its own devices works just as well. Sometimes Space Siege attempts to strike fear into the player with a scripted encounter, such as having alien critters fall from the ceiling, but one area effect stun move later and then it's business as usual. Gas Powered's Dungeon Siege games were far more challenging and fulfilling.
The choices you'll make on your journey are limited to how you spec out Seth Walker, and these decisions are far from satisfying. There are two skill trees, Combat and Engineering, and they generally only provide bland, under-the-hood changes to your combat abilities. You'll get passive bonuses to your attacks with point allotments, like a 2% increase to attack power, or a 2% increase to your chance to critical, with an occasional new ability thrown in for good measure. There are no levels, no major upgrades to look forward to. You'll just steadily increase your ability to deal damage without any real feeling of ever achieving anything you didn't have when first starting the game.
The most significant way that you'll change your character is by deciding whether or not to implant cybernetic upgrades, like cybernetic legs or a cybernetic brain. These upgrades provide significant bonuses over your fleshy human parts, but they reduce your humanity rating. Only by keeping a humanity rating over 90% can you gain access to a unique ability in the combat or engineering tree. Sadly, these abilities aren't worth holding out for: sure, you can make it so that you only take 50% damage from foes, but wouldn't you rather wield the cybernetic weapons?
Human or Robot: It Doesn't Matter
Despite being one of the main selling points of Space Siege, the humanity versus cybernetics angle isn't played to its fullest potential. Silicon Knights' upcoming Too Human explores the same, but that game offers entirely different skill trees based on whether you choose to stay human or embrace the mechanical side. The possibility was here for some interesting decision-making, but it's woefully unexplored.
Space Siege doesn't even have any loot to speak of. What kind of RPG doesn't have loot? Instead of picking up weapons and armor, every enemy in the game drops nondescript "upgrade materials" which can be used at workbenches to upgrade your character and weaponry. There are ten weapons in the game, but they are unlocked through the storyline, and they're all comparable to each other. The submachine guns, for instance, fire quickly and offer dual shots, while the rocket launcher fires slowly but is able to deal area effect damage.
Don't expect to be attaching fancy scopes or alternate ammunition types to these guns. Every weapon upgrade is the same, allowing you to increase rate of fire, upgrade damage, increase chance to crit, and so on. The melee-based Magblade that you start off with is powerful enough to deal with pretty much anything in the game, so you might as well just upgrade that and any one ranged weapon.
If you're determined to squeeze some fun out of Space Siege, your best bet is to explore the multiplayer component. By logging onto the GPGNet, you can host and join multiplayer scenarios that are short missions that are light on story but heavy on enemies to blow up. They're all remarkably similar to each other, just like the single-player campaign, but at least here you can choose higher-difficulty missions that will at least provide more of a challenge in the form of tougher enemies.
Sadly, with more than one player even the highest-difficulty missions are still woefully easy to clear simply by walking in and mowing down anything in your path. In just a few missions, you'll have earned enough upgrade materials and skill points to create a nearly unstoppable character. You start off the multiplayer game with access to enough points to max out an entire skill tree, so every character ends up pretty much the same, the only difference being what sort of weapon you choose to specialize in.
Space Siege is a game that had a lot of potential, but it feels like it was never fleshed out beyond the very basics. It lacks depth, offers minimal incentive to continue playing past the first hour or two, and doesn't do anything with its online offerings that could convince you to neglect the countless other games that offer far richer multiplayer experiences. There's no reason to pick this one up unless you're desperate for something in the space milieu. If that's enough to make you happy, it may be time for you to raise your standards.
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