Omen

Its a fun game at first, about going into a space map with stations, shooting your way through it to collect resources, then extract through the stargate. Find blueprints to craft items and equip your spaceship to finish the story. What is good: - Controls - Story - Combat - Style (although subjective) - Enemy diversity - Music and Sound Design What is Neutral or Not good: - relatively short with about 7 hours playtime for one playthrough - no replayability - the maps arent really different enough in visual style - pretty much no real need for the extraction or building gameplay (see below). The main problem here lies in two aspects that cause a chain of further problems with the games contents and mechanics, especially with how it advertises itself to potential buyers. 1.) Extraction Design is not working Theres far too few items and gadgets to find or build. None of the weapons you can find have different stats from each other. The Chaingun you find is exactly the same you can craft. Without randomization in the loot and with the lack of options (80 items sounds like much, but it isnt really), theres not much reason to own more than 2 of each weapon and one of every other item. Theres also far too few stuff to take care of, to maintain its economy. I gathered so much stuff so easily, that i went into a mission to meet the merchant and sell my stuff. With one run i amassed so many "credits" that i could buy anything. Problem is, the Merchant doesnt sell anything valuable or unique and you dont need any Credits to do anything. That means the entire Credits mechanic is pointless, as theres no way to invest them. Theres also no other vendors and you cant "level" yourself. You cant invest credits to become stronger or buy Blueprints or buy rare stuff etc. I carried my credits through the entire run without needing them. You dont really need much material to extract, because stuff is either cheap or you arent really losing stuff. When you die, you go in again and loot your body. You dont need to craft ammunition etc, so no reason to obtain resources. But even with permanent item loss, its no biggie. Just craft the items with the tons of resources you stacked up. In one defense mission i instantly died, my entire base was destroyed and i lost items from my stash. I went to the crafting menu, and recrafted all 15 or so buildings without a problem, because i already had like 70 of each resource in stock. 2.) Building is also pointless The mechanic only feeds itself and shouldnt really exist. Building your citadel spacestation has only two purposes: 1. being able to craft higher rarity resources for stronger items and 2. place defenses for when enemies attack your base. It works like this: You enter a raid to loot and extract. You can do this X times (a number shows how often). Once you did that a few times, a number goes to 0 and the enemies raid your base. Then you cant just skip that part and go into your next raid, you need to enter a "Defense" Mission. There you need to repel enemy waves until all are dead or you lost. Thats it. Building thus never felt useful at all and destroyed buildings could be simply replaced. I wished, that the entire building aspect was more bound to progression and gameplay, like having the base spawn on each map as your "extraction" point but also being able to trade. But at the very least it could have been a meta progression substitute. Another major issue comes from how the game handles loot. The items are categorized in tiers. Green/Grey is standard, blue is better, red is the best. Except for Ship Hulls. Problem with that is, that nothing maintains its importance. Once you obtained a blue variant of a weapon or gadget, the green one is irrelevant. Thats no good solution to keep you invested in its different weapons. It also fragments the content, as from the 40 weapons you will end up only using like 5, because the 5 red ones are outperforming all others, pretty much trashing the rest of the cast. An upgrade system would have gone a big way here. Being able to use credits, visiting some sort of mechanic or arms crafter, pay the guy and upgrade your green to blue, to red. Same for Ship Hulls, Upgrade it and expand it with a slot you like. Add another Engine/Reactor Slot for more energy or whatever. So the games content is pretty empty. You move through different maps to obtain loot and at first thats cool, but already midgame you wont need it anymore and ignore the entire extraction portion, the building, the inventory management, the crafting and beyond that, theres nothing to do. No skilltree or whatever. Why arent there buildings buffing you permantently and you can upgrade them with credits? Since you have limited building slots, you would also have to make a choice on what you want to buff. Why no upgrade system to forge better weapon variants etc? Maybe give them affixes. Theres even a map called "The Forge". Theres also a lot of smaller problematic things, like not being able to switch slot - key assignments. So on that one ship your missiles will ever be triggered by E, not right mouse button. Some maps are pointless to exist. Theres an entire map with the sole purpose to obtain Nuclear Material to craft an Atomic Missile Launcher. A red weapon, therefor strong and it kind of is, but also isnt. Yet the maps purpose doesnt go beyond. No NG+, no Permadeath, No Peram Loot Loss Option, no randomized "dungeon", no randomized loot, not enough to craft. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [b]Core issue and verdict[/b] All in all, its a good idea and i like the overall presentation and play. But it seems like the dev wanted to make a game picking certain mechanics, without really understanding how they work or what keeps them going. "Extraction" is a really fun mechanic, but it doesnt work when the game throws stuff at you on one side, but doesnt give you options to make use of it. "Extraction" is cool and fun, but when you eliminate the risk you eliminate the tension and the feeling of danger. "Building" a base is cool, but if it doesnt serve any purpose, it doesnt matter. In your typical extraction game you expand your base to get more ways to spend resources, improve yourself (stat upgrades) etc. Its basically Meta Progression and it would fix the above mentioned issue, of adding ways to spend your resources. But it doesnt work that way here. "Looting" is cool, but only when you care about it and run for the chance to obtain that slightly better piece, that attachment to your weapon, to customize it to your liking, the resource you needed to reach a major milestone in your progression, maybe find a tool you need to open the path to a new region. "Equipment" is fun when it provides options without making too much of a difference in its strength. It WOULD be fine to have tiered items with clear trash, medium useful and superior items, but only when you have a working Extraction Game environment and economy. When the trash is necessary because you wasted your top gear in the last mission and now you need to recover and recoup. The Trash is useful when you want to do loot raids with low risk. But since theres no risk involved, theres no reason to have tiered items, no need to do low equip loot raids. What kept me playing through was the actual combat. Its fun shooting stuff, it looks cool, flying around is cool, the weapons smack. Sadly the games entire design falls apart, because it doesnt understand how "extraction" works and whats necessary to keep it running. The lack of variety, the lack of randomness, the lack of risk and the lack of progression options, just kills the entire design. I would be fine if this was Early Access. But as a finished game, this doesnt work well mechanically. Good attempt, solid Space Shmup with engaging story (to a degree), but the entire rest is not going well.