I’m sorry for teasing a review like this, but as it is, I’m not sure there will be one. See, this game is just not made for me, at all. If it was a CYOA (Choose Your Own Adventure) instead of being classified as an RPG, I wouldn’t have any problems with the game. However, it isn’t. Colony Ship is much like Iron Tower Studios’ former game The Age of Decadence – in that it’s very rigid when it comes to class building, progression, and skill checks. Maybe less so, but the fundamental game design remains the same. An additional note to this article that should be regarded; Don’t treat this piece as a final critique, as I don’t know if any of my observations change for the better later in the game. These are just my initial observations and thoughts.
I enjoyed The Age of Decadence for a playthrough or two until I realized how little you are allowed to do outside the class pick for your relatively linear path through the game. What finally killed off my interest was the static world, in combination with location teleportation. The game disregards every form of exploration, which to me is a big aspect of the RPG genre. Colony Ship, to my dismay, is just much of the same, but this time, instead of being located in an interesting post-apocalyptic ancient Roman setting, you now have to cope with drab dystopian Amazon warehouses that will zap any humanity right out of anyone.
Visual style
The dreary visuals are most likely an intentional style to convey just that feeling, but the graphics are not pleasing in any way. Going for something more fantasy in space would have been a more fun pick. Like for example the retrofuturistc style of Logan’s Run.
The dystopian feeling wouldn’t come through immediately, but it would be a nice contrast to the depressive story taking place during your time in Colony Ship (much like the film). On top of making the navigation a bit of a pain, since you can’t rotate the camera in this boxy 3D world, the 3D graphics feels kinda wasted. After discovering stuff, you will just use the map teleport function (once again) to get to places. There is no reason to run back and forth, as nothing will happen unless something has been hard-scripted to do so.
Skill checks
Skills are designed in a way I like, meaning they increase with doing instead of stat allocations by leveling. It’s a fine system if it allows for any kind of dynamism when you are applying the skills to the different skill checks throughout the game. However in Colony Ship, it’s very rigid and doesn’t allow for any “grinding” to improve your skills. Take stealing for example. You can’t steal from random people unless they have been set up that way that allows for a skill check. There is no way to improve your skill unless you find an NPC that you are allowed to steal from that has your matching skill level. There is no RNG (from what I understand) involved in any of this – nothing surprising will ever happen, it’s either you do or you don’t. And to improve your skill in this particular case, you will have to find a victim that has a skill check that you can overcome. After that, you will have to find the people that have a higher requirement matching yours and go from there. It’s a very unimmersive system and gamifies the skill increase in the worst possible way.
That is why I like RNG in my skill checks, and I know it’s a heretical thing among many cRPG players, but as I see it (which is my justification) is that even the master smooth talker can stumble over his words from time to time, and the most uncharismatic idiot, can by luck also make a good point once in a while. As it is now, and while Colony Ship has many different outcomes for many interactions, there is no randomness or surprises here. It can argued that this promotes META gameplay too – that you need knowledge of certain skill checks to avoid getting locked into an impossible fight. I find this is made worse in Colony Ship, since you can’t kill whoever you want, like in Fallout for example, which shares hard-set skill checks.
It turns into a game of hitting the required skill checks, instead of playing the game, allowing the player a degree of freedom and sandbox elements to do what he or she wants. Overall, I just find this system boring and railroaded. I do like games that have similar systems to this, but usually, the hard skill checks are only for optional stuff that doesn’t lock you out of certain paths. And yes, you can argue against RNG too, as this can create a mentality of saving and loading (save scumming) to get the desired outcome. However, I find that this mostly falls on the designer to create interesting fail-states to discourage the degeneracy of constantly reloading.
Combat
The combat is very nuXcom but with an increased set of debuffs and stuff you can do through shooting different parts of the body. While this sounds pretty good, it doesn’t feel very exciting in practice. First off, the distances are very short. It reminds me of that famous clip from The Naked Gun where they have a gunfight two meters apart.
And for the second, the enemy NPCs are just way too tanky, making the fights drag out. The guns have no oomph to them. It’s like you are shooting pellet guns, while the bad guys have been equipped with very real and manly weapons. However, in my limited time playing, I discovered a way to “break” the game with my shotgun-wielding warehouse worker. If you shoot enemies in the legs, it will boost the aim for future attacks, even up to a hundred percent, and this is while doing damage to the target simultaneously. This means that every attack after a few rounds of shotgun blasts to the legs will never be missed – not for you or your companions. Why ever aim for the head, when leg shots get the job done?
Story & characters
I don’t have too much to say here, since I’m not very far into the game. The dialogue seems fine, but there is a lot of exposition dumped on you right from the start. The main character is presented as someone who knows all this and knows the surrounding parts and people in it. However, when interacting with people, you come off as a newborn to this world, not knowing right from left. I also found that the quests escalate quickly, leaving very little to ponder. After about twenty minutes I was dragged into some kind of turf war between factions, and well, I couldn’t care less about them. It all goes a little too fast and does not present the conflict or the involved characters that great. The menu teleportation doesn’t help with this either. There is no sense of actually being in a place. Sometimes even the quest givers teleport you, instead of you having to find the location yourself. They just teleport you to a cramped room, and if the skill checks don’t work out in your favor, you have another confined Xcom fight on your hands.
Final thoughts
Everything in this impression piece has to be taken with a grain of salt. That is because I don’t know all of the mechanics, or how the story and combat turn out. It might turn into an excellent RPG, but my initial impressions say that I probably won’t enjoy it that much. It’s not a bad game, a lot of effort has gone into the skill checks and different outcomes with many playthroughs in mind. But you have to wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to create the systems that allow for a more sandbox experience where all these playthroughs are covered, instead of making every possible skill check workable in some kind of CYOA approach? In the end, it just seems to leave the player with little else to do than to build an optimal character for that specific route you want, clicking teleport menus and shooting dudes in the knees. Until next time.
Thanks for reading.
/Thomas
I should add when I wrote this piece, Colony Ship hadn’t been patched. The patch added a follow-cam and made walking possible. Which was one of my initial “immersion” problems with the game.
| System: | PC (Steam) |
| Played with: | Mouse & keyboard |
| Mods/fixes: | None |
| Enjoyment rating: |  |
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