Space Siege

Multiplayer

So, the gameplay is static and staid and the graphics are apparently unalterable and uninspiring – making Space Siege a game as seemingly bland as they come, yet there may be one saving grace for the game yet.

Co-op. We love co-op games and it’s the one, lone reason that everyone in the office is visibly vibrating in anticipation of Valve’s Left4Dead or why I still play Serious Sam regularly.

Space Siege has a separate campaign for cooperative gaming, allowing up to four players to play the game together and progress through new and interesting levels as they fight back against the alien enemy.

It should be great. It should be fun. It should be excellent LAN material – and that was exactly my reasoning for pressuring both Harry and Richard into playing some of the co-op campaign. Unfortunately, I just ended up regretting the fact that I had wasted both their time and mine.

The problem with the co-operative game is the same as the problem with the singleplayer game, except here it is compounded by the fact that you can’t die and have access to all weapons and upgrades at the start of the first mission. Thus, there’s no real sense of achievement or progression other than salvaging enough parts to put a damage multiplier on your rocket launcher every few save points.


The formula is still the same, but worse. You walk into a room, this time with your friends, and you all stand still and shoot until either you die or the enemy does. You carry this on until you run out of luck, at which point you’re separated from the group and sent back to the last save point. There are usually four or five per level, but they’re so spaced out that they are useless.

Within the first few battles your group is spread out. One person dies and is respawned a good few minutes walk behind everyone else, then by the time he catches up someone else is in the same trap. The whole thing becomes more of an endurance marathon than a satisfying game experience.

There are a few redeeming features to the co-op experience and it is at least a little gratifying to see that the co-op campaign is suitably long, filled with decent objectives and so on – but at the same time the lengthier and more complex the level is the more frustrating it becomes.



The designers have obviously tried to hide the tedious and inescapable linearity of the game in both the single and multi player versions, adding on extra side rooms and so on, but really they’re there only for players to continue the grindfest in and since the co-op game gives you all the rewards at the introduction there seems to be little point to them.

Conclusions

I’ve been reading the latest of Kieron Gillen’s manifestoes lately and one of the ideas he presents which struck me most of all is that games critics should be more open to ranking reviews based on the emotion they summon in them. It’s something I can see the merit in, especially after my previous attempts to divert attention to gaming’s underdogs.

So, if I was going to attach an emotion to Space Siege then it would be thus; m’eh.

It isn’t that the game is really bad or anything since the basic mechanics all work and if you’re really into singleplayer grindfests then this will be a treat for sure. The issue is though that the game is utterly unremarkable and unable to stand out in literally anyway.

The level design is long, winding and pointless and it constantly seems like the entire point of the game is to make you run backwards and forward through the same hallways you cleared of enemies just a few minutes before. The plot is generic to the point that it's practically an NPC from a Legend of Zelda game and the skill trees aren't much better, proving boring and brainless so that the game is definitely more hack than slash.

What action there is require almost no player involvement and carries almost no penalties, which the developers have used as an excuse to stack the odds against you, something makes the game less exciting and just more tedious. It isn’t broken, but it still needs fixing.