Drox Operative Preview
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The game's premise is reasonably straightforward: you are the eponymous Drox Operative, traversing a randomly generated galaxy in your ship with the goal of manipulating and/or assisting the resident alien races so as to bring your chosen one to power and eliminate all of the others. Along the way you will explore unknown regions, investigate strange anomalies, ferry cargo and passengers, find shiny loot and shoot an awful lot of things in order to gain influence with your target faction(s). Like many ARPGs, your character persists between games, retaining their level, stats and gear and allowing you to advance through the ranks; as you level up you gain access to larger ships with more equipment slots and thicker hulls and each new game allows you to tailor the relative level of the enemies, depending on how much of a challenge you fancy. There is, of course, a hardcore mode if you're feeling daring and also a semi-hardcore (hardcore with lives is probably the best description) mode if you're not sure how daring you're feeling.
Your galaxy is made up of a number of randomly generated sectors linked by either Warp Gates, which allow you to travel to any inhabited sector where you have paid the required toll, Space Lanes and Stable Wormholes, which are direct two-way paths between two different sectors, or Unstable Wormholes, which are single-use and send you to random destinations. Each sector is populated by planets some uninhabited and ripe for looting and some occupied by one of the game's eight races, who may trade with you, offer you quests or shoot you on sight as well as anomalies, derelicts, junk, asteroids and storage caches, all of which can be looted in the hope of finding shinier gear for your ship.
Additionally, there are five '˜monster' races who don't have any planets, hopes or dreams and instead just hang around in empty space waiting to try and kill anything that wanders too close, which is usually you. One of the things that has impressed me about Drox Operative is the way that they have managed to make their space feel big without making it feel too empty; it's a difficult balance to maintain and they do a good job of it.
