Space. It is vast and endless. It is the eternal sea, ever-expanding into a field of reverent stars, silently judging us as we find new ways and reasons for killing each other.
Many games have tried to estimate what our violent future will hold, and so far none of them have come close to the truth. However, we can safely assume that the future will not be strangely incomplete and a tad boring. The future is not Salvation Prophecy.
Nope
Salvation Prophecy started with an interesting concept that was known in 2004 as Star Wars: Battlefront, only instead of progress, SP went with the opposite of that. The result is a game that’s really good, but only if you handicap your criteria enough, sort of like how a finger painting done by a pre-schooler is graded differently from actual art.
“Psh… Casuals”- Da Vinci
At its core, SP tries to be a massive space murder fun house. There are massive planet side space battles, sprawling space dog fights, and space planet conquering, all of which occurs in space. Now, to some people that sounds pretty cool, but the discerning eye will notice that those concepts of mass battles, dogfights, and army control can be three distinct games on their own. So how’s a small indie developer supposed to bring all of these ideas together in a way that creates something new for the consuming public?
Basically, they don’t. Looking at the final product tells me that Salvation Prophecy was too big a project with nary the resources behind it. For everything this game tries there’s already a game out there doing it better, with flashier graphics and smoother controls. MAG, PlanetSide 2, StarCraft 2, Sins of the Solar Empire, Moon Breakers, and many others could scratch that assortment of itches, and instead of focusing on a single aspect, Salvation Prophecy spreads itself too thin and does nothing particularly well.
Missions usually involve the game telling you were to go, giving you a briefing that tells you where to go, then making you fly there, then waiting for you to fly back, after wards.
Let’s take planetary combat, for example. Characters move and shoot like they’re in an MMO, but with fewer abilities. Each army consists of multiple identical character models, all with the same capabilities, as though the game is about four people with cloning vats and a blood feud. Also, and this may be the worst sin, your presence never feels necessary. The only way to win a battle is to stay clustered in a group. Anything else gets you killed, which means the only strategy is to be part of the collective. You’re not a hero, you’re a pawn. Meanwhile, the planets are woefully barren of both set pieces and personality.
Destroyed buildings dissolve like Final Fantasy VII enemies… I’m actually gonna call that a point in the game’s favor.
Dog fights aren’t much different. Actually, they’re worse since every ship in the game has the ability to restore its shields to full multiple times, but not the AI to actually use that in any strategic way. You end up doing lethal damage to each enemy ship about four times, usually while you and the enemy stand still because that’s the only way to hit anything for a worthwhile amount of damage.
It’s this with band-aids.
Eventually, your character is given a command position that allows you to boss around the low-level peons in your army just as you were bossed around so many missions before, and so the cycle of bullying continues. As a commander, you assign missions and send out forces, but since you’re stuck in a four-way free-for-all there’s nothing you can take for yourself that isn’t very quickly lost on another planet. Again, the cycle.
Later, aliens attack from another dimension, but at that point I just didn’t care. I was already caught in a pointless war that wasn’t any fun to war in, and five to six hours in is no time to start introducing a storyline.
No, Syr’Blak… I’m sorry, it’s just… I’m not in the mood.
I think what most disappointed me was knowing what could have been. With modern graphics, competent AI, a fleshed-out story, or maybe if the members of each army were live players this game would be vastly improved. Maybe if effort were made to make me care about my faction, or if the voice acting wasn’t done by soundboards, or if there was more to this universe than perpetual war, I would have felt like this universe was worth saving instead of it being such a hassle.
We shall conquer this desert world and build our own pointless defenses! Haha!
But like I said, what stands out is this game’s potential. I feel like if this same title had more money behind it, it could have been a phenomenal excursion into the starry beyond. Everything about this game’s lack of polish reeks of the studio not having the resources to do what they really wanted to do. Maybe- just maybe, the best way to judge this game is to realize that this tiny studio with no development budget put together a functional game. Yes, their ideas were outside of their scope, but that’s this time around. With ideas this big, I’m excited to see what this team does next, assuming they learn to work within scale.
Now, let’s end off on a whoosh noise:
The post Salvation Prophecy Review appeared first on 6aming.