Review - In Space We BrawlReview by Jon Evans
Format Reviewed - PS3, PS4 |
Developers; Forge Reply
Publisher; Forge Reply Formats; PS3, PS4 Release Date; US 14/10/14 EU 15/10/2014 |
First off, I'm going to be writing this in the first person. Also, I’m writing this while feckless on 15-year old single malt. This game has driven me to drink. I feel like an American movie cliché, sitting in a bar, mulling over my lost love/partner/case while weeping angrily into a glass of sticky brown fluid. I reach for another Lucky Strike and type angrily on the keyboard.
I live with my non-gaming wife and kids who I’m slowly indoctrinating into to the world of the controller and screen. My really close friends, the ones who are happy to play vintage split screen COD, or race round the streets of London in GT5, or enjoy fucking up my stealthy approach to a room full of terrorists in Rainbow Six all live far away from me now. This makes playing a local co-op only game, seriously hard to review. In Space We Brawl is a four-player local co-op only game (yup, no online), where you battle each other in funky spaceships while defending yourself against alien craft, asteroids, debris and other space-guff. I did find some more local friends to play, and it was interesting to get their opinions as seriously bemused non-gamers.
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You have at your disposal a good variety of craft and weapons, a lot of which are unlocked after playing the challenge modes, which you can customise according to your play-style. each ship has cool, crazy sci-fi names, Like ‘Striker', ‘Juggernaut', ‘Monolith’, ‘Leviathan’ and, rather confusingly, 'Plasma Sword'. These are all accompanied by one of those fancy little radar graphs which show your ship’s strengths and weaknesses in a little spider-web style infographic. You also have an array of different weapons to choose from too. Again these have names like ‘Cosmic Spreader’ (shotgun), ‘Stinger Swarm’ (homing missiles), 'Photon Flux’ (laser, basically) and ‘Cruiser’ (guided missile). You can mix and match your ship and weapons to suit how you intend to brawl and hope you have the tactical advantage while playing. You also have a ‘variety’ of environments to battle within, with difficulty settings changing the challenge to include more debris, Aliens, Black holes, turrets and ‘space wind’ (don't ask).
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Brawling is fun, especially when playing with a full compliment of four players. On the PS4, the controllers lights match the colour of your ship, making it a bit easier to see who everyone is, and various sound effects gurgle out of the DS4 speakers when you get pasted by an asteroid or another player making for a more inchoate experience, but it does still descend into a confused free-for-all where occasionally the game mechanics let it down - more on that later. I get the feeling that this game is very much for the brawler fan, who will invest time in practicing the various ship combinations and use a lot of trial and error to find the best modifications of her ship to play with. Nevertheless we had a few giggles, and shared the experience of not really being any better than each other.
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Once you finish a game, which can either be a straight battle with several rounds, or a tournament, you get a round-up of your results. This shows you who killed you, how many kills you made and your accuracy. You also get a series of descriptions based on your performance. examples such as ‘fearless’ and ‘untouchable’ pop up showing how you fared in-game. I’m not sure how relevant these were. I got pounded pretty bad in one game, so I’m not sure the phrase, ‘untouchable’ was very appropriate. You also get various themed voices, who I believe represent the different alien races who are battling. They were interesting and amusing, but after repeated play became tedious and annoying (although my children thought they were hilarious to the point that their laughing caused milk to shoot out of their nostrils) and sounded like Sacha Baron Cohen testing out his new range of characters for 'Ali-G in Da Arcade’.
Let’s move onto the great big, knobbly, floating space elephant in the room. The Challenge Mode. This is, essentially, a series of tutorials that act both to teach you how to use all the weapons in the game, but also rewards you by unlocking said weapons. There’s almost a complete game here in itself. Believe me when I say, I spent more time playing these fuckers than the actual brawler. Herein lies the problem. The Challenge Modes highlighted for me the real flaws in this game, which are many and turned my experience from a fun mindless mucking about with friends to a personal vendetta of the highest order.
The Challenge Mode resembles the GT license system, where you have to take a series of 'driving tests' to complete each challenge. Each of these challenges teach you an aspect of how to control your space brawler. All I can say if my teacher was this intolerant and unforgiving of my mistakes I would have run away from school.
The Challenge Mode resembles the GT license system, where you have to take a series of 'driving tests' to complete each challenge. Each of these challenges teach you an aspect of how to control your space brawler. All I can say if my teacher was this intolerant and unforgiving of my mistakes I would have run away from school.
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The challenges involve moving past asteroids to checkpoints to get used to your flying controls, raising your shields against turrets, activating your boosters to zoom around large objects and many other skills to learning about the attributes of your ship. My first issue with these challenges, is that they are presented in a series of dialogue-based lessons by rambunctious robots with confusing and irrelevant military ranks. Each challenge has several steps of increasing difficulty to overcome to pass the challenge. Successfully get through three of the four steps but fail the last? Do the whole lot, over and over again, all with painfully slow dialogue to have to click through over and over again. Argh. I pour another Whisky.
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Not only that, but the collision physics are fuzzy, imprecise and unforgiving, as is the motion of the ship. The checkpoints are large glowing targets in space, a bit like gun reticules, but they seem to have a terrible economy of space. They glow, spreading out and shrinking to quite a large radius, with a triumvirate of vertices within and a pinpoint spot at the centre. Unless your ship passes exactly through the centre of the pinpoint, you don't register as hitting it. Too many times I thought I had successfully finished the challenge. Before discovering that having the entire ship inside the reticule didn't necessarily mean that I had completed the challenge. Another two fingers of Whisky.
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Restarting levels was slow and clunky too, with various boxes, menus and dialogues to click through to retry the challenge, I longed for a single restart button like you get in OlliOlli and Velocity 2X. In a game of constant retrying, this should have been a simple feature to add. The first challenge teaches you that you can fly off one side of the screen and return on the other side in classic 'Asteroids' style which is a cool retro feature. This fun aspect is completely disregarded on the ensuing challenges as a way of solving the tasks, to the point of actually accusing you of cheating the level. Additionally, the cross-over is also too vague and wide. It is possible to play the entire game off screen, still spinning and moving without visibly returning to the other side. I take a drag of my smoke, and wash it down with more Whisky.
The fact is, to really enjoy the main game, you need those guns. The difficulty ramp of the challenge is badly placed, with very easy early stages that jump to a much harder challenge for the final one. I’m not a big brawler fan, and perhaps Forge Reply are catering to the more hardcore gamer than me. Accessibility does seem to be the weak point of this game, as the challenges are, most certainly, not fun. It feels like they were created to pad out the main game, and I would rather have a product that gives me all the weapons and toys straight away, lets me play and experiment in the brawler and reward me with a fun experience. The time and resources could then have been spent on a better artist, to improve the childish lack lustre backgrounds and sprites, sack the dubstep fan and get a better musician on the soundtrack, tidy up the mechanics and bloody well implement cross-save and online multiplayer. This game feel more at home on the PS3, lacking the next-gen sparkle and it might be worth seeking out gems that do it better like Luftrausers. I also really don’t know anyone who owns four DS4 controllers which makes investing in this game as an impulse-buy unlikely. I throw the empty bottle back at the bartender and order another.
The fact is, to really enjoy the main game, you need those guns. The difficulty ramp of the challenge is badly placed, with very easy early stages that jump to a much harder challenge for the final one. I’m not a big brawler fan, and perhaps Forge Reply are catering to the more hardcore gamer than me. Accessibility does seem to be the weak point of this game, as the challenges are, most certainly, not fun. It feels like they were created to pad out the main game, and I would rather have a product that gives me all the weapons and toys straight away, lets me play and experiment in the brawler and reward me with a fun experience. The time and resources could then have been spent on a better artist, to improve the childish lack lustre backgrounds and sprites, sack the dubstep fan and get a better musician on the soundtrack, tidy up the mechanics and bloody well implement cross-save and online multiplayer. This game feel more at home on the PS3, lacking the next-gen sparkle and it might be worth seeking out gems that do it better like Luftrausers. I also really don’t know anyone who owns four DS4 controllers which makes investing in this game as an impulse-buy unlikely. I throw the empty bottle back at the bartender and order another.
Wrap up
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Good - fun with four friends. As long as you stay away from the challenge mode.
Bad - Lacklustre design, misjudged difficulty in the challenge mode, iffy mechanics, derivative soundtrack, no cross-save, no online multiplayer. |
2/5 |
Game provided by developer
Images courtesy of Forge Reply
Images courtesy of Forge Reply
