Space Siege Review

Article Index

Eschalon: Book II

Publisher:SEGA
Developer:Gas Powered Games
Release Date:2008-08-12
Genre:
  • Action,Role-Playing
Platforms: Theme: Perspective:
  • Third-Person
Buy this Game: Amazon ebay
To help you in your battles, you get a robot named HR-V (sounds like (Harvey)) to assist you. But like most parts of the game, HR-V is just a shell of what he could be. HR-V gets one good moment in the campaign when he comes to your rescue, but otherwise he doesn't talk or even beep, he's not given any sort of personality, and he just ends up being a follower and an attack drone.

Similarly, character development isn't very interesting. The much publicized decision about whether you should keep your character human or allow him to become more of a machine doesn't come to anything, simply because the benefits are weighted way in favor of becoming a machine. For example, adding cybernetic parts to your character gives you bonuses; not adding them gives you nothing. And of the game's 29 skills, 14 of them require you to have cybernetic parts; only two of them require you to be 90% human, and you can't even learn both of them.

The only reason to stay human in the campaign is to make it more difficult, but that's a valid choice because the combat is largely easy. Plus, there are (aid stations) all over the place, and if you die you just get sent to the closest one, often without losing any of the damage you caused to your enemies (only certain boss fights make you start over). I played the campaign as a pure human character, and I only half developed HR-V so I could pick up his base weapon stats, and I still cruised through the battles, only having trouble in the final boss fight. My guess is that if you install the cybernetic parts and pick and choose the best skills, the campaign is a joke.

A long time ago, I reviewed an adventure (it was so long ago that I don't even remember the name), and all I liked about it was the animated butterflies. Well, I had a similar response to Space Siege. All over the Armstrong you find gas canisters, and if you shoot them then they go flying around before eventually exploding. That never got old for me, but the rest of the game is sort of a waste. Space Siege is at best comparable to $20 bargain bin action role-playing games. It's short and repetitive, it's so linear that there's almost no replay value, and the ending is sort of a sad joke (if you're feeling educational, look up (pyrrhic victory) in a dictionary). So don't go anywhere near this game unless its price drops way down, and probably not even then.