"Bound for a star with fiery ocean
It's so very lonely, you're a hundred light-years from home"
The Rolling Stones - 2000 Light Years From Home
Continued from here.
Colony Ship has made me revise my plans twice now, first by convincing me to write down a play-by-play, now by delaying the promised Chapter 2 until I've decided to just shelve my playthrough to its official release date. Long story short, despite some needless frustration I'd recommend this one more confidently than I did Iron Tower's previous Age of Decadence.
Still, I might as well post my experience in The Factory, a sort of intermission zone between chapters, whose action revolves around various gangs facing off over a cavernous industrial expanse from production units turned into towering fortresses. I didn't quite make it to level 5/10 in the first chapter, which only further suggests that I'm probably doomed, but mayhap my dedication to the nerdlier arts will pay off somehow.
Love the initial run between forts doubling as a gauntlet of mid-difficulty skill checks covering almost everything from pocket-picking to picket-poking. The random single decisions break your stride, masking the obvious excuse to make you pause and look at their level design every other screen. Sneaky! This is what every game should have instead of scene-setting intro cinematics.
But oh noes! It's an ambush! And what with the half a dozen different off-hand comments about it being a quiet day but the enemy might strike at any moment, I never even saw it coming! Hmmm, should I abandon my ironically nicknamed guide to her death and run, thereby also abandoning the initial bump of loot and XP which will get me through the rest of the chapter, or valiantly stand against impossible odds defending yon plucky maid and fighting for every scrap of advantage in a game with zero chances to recuperate a missed opportunity? Can you kids at home tell our valiant hero the correct choice?
Fifty tries later (and that is NOT hyperbole) Smiles remains pearly, Stanton (he of the Fort) is happy and we're off to turn street gangs against each other... iiinn SPAAAAACE! Meaning I can now explore the factory at will.
As a multi-layered, gigantic interior space littered with the efforts of past generations it serves both for Iron Tower to showcase progress from AoD's rather sparse desert tilesets (oh crap... the twist at the end... it's not going to be some "it was Earth all along" schtick, is it?) and to illustrate the ship as its own self-contained world in keeping with its inspiration's original title of Universe... but also that it falls short in one sense: gravity. While Orphans of the Sky's action centered on warring mutant ape tribes with no knowledge of astronomy or their "universe"-s nature, Heinlein deftly, unobtrusively reminded you every few pages the story was set IN SPACE usually by remarking on mutagenic cosmic rays or gravity increasing or decreasing with the protagonists' ascent or descent through deck levels, strengthening or slackening the effects of rotation. In contrast, Colony Ship's inhabitants are painfully aware of their thankless role as the middle children of history and make occasional verbal references to their descendants' destination... but it's no longer enough. A visual or interactive medium presumes some shift to visual or interactive cues, and by now I find myself wondering whether I'm actually in Detroit-in-space... or just Detroit. Not a major drawback, but still, an actual mechanism like variable artificial gravity would've helped cement the spacefaring setting.
Short exploration. Pop some frogs, crash a turret, jimmy a mnemonic, good stuff.
Oh, did I not mention the frogs?
Instead of rats as basic vermin you get frogs, just to keep the routine swampy-fresh. Given the many SciFi references which pepper Colony Ship include a vault dweller suit, they're probably more than a little inspired by Fallout 2's golden geckos. Still, they came out entertaining enough thanks to putting some extra work into their combat animations. Can't remember seeing RPG mobs pulling my leg before... or trying to bite my ear off once they've knocked me down.
Starting to notice a slight skew to the new skill leveling. While I've run across several computer/lockpicking checks at level 2-3 allowing for their use as a secondary skill, speech skill checks rose exclusively to the prohibitive 4-5 range i.e. maxed out. Maybe it's due to diplomacy being more of a stand-in for combat (replacing more content than the technical skill bypasses, therefore more powerful) but it still seems just slightly over-balanced. Suffice to say my interview with gangster #1 did not go well.
Join us for glory: [FAIL]
Join us or we'll kill you: [FAIL]
Join us because gangster #2 will turn on you: [FAIL]
Fight all of them head on? Not a chance.
At least talking to gangster #2 I found a more attractive option:
Join us bec- oh, fuck it, just toss me in prison: [SUCCESS]
The point being to stage a jailbreak of course. IT'S SNEAKY T-
sorry ... (it's sneaky-time)
 |
| Yes, I know about the typo, but can't fix it now. |
Stealth runs show Colony Ship at both its best and its worst.
On the plus side, fairly thorough skill integration. Low sneak and computers would let you kill one, maybe two guards before getting caught. With high points in both you may be able to sweep the base clean. Not being specialized in sneak I still picked up the boss' office loot and nominal mission success by environment interaction.
On the minus side, it takes 8-9 rounds to reach the above point of divergence via exactly the same steps (and stabs) every time, Colony Ship does not allow saving in combat, and failing triggers a cutscene catapulting you into the next zone, wasting even more of your click-through time reloading. Like most developers from loner undergrads to EA, Iron Tower pads out its campaign length with some pretty blatant timesinks.
Anyway, turns out that perhaps due to failin' me parlay, despite succeeding against Mano Negra my tour guides were backstabbed by Detroit. That's the mentality here. That's the reality here. Did I just hear somebody say they wanna challenge me... in the next zone? Because one way or another that's where you're headed. I did tell Stanton to seek allies and get ready to retalliate against a home office takeover, so hopefully that'll get the diplomacy over with before I return. Anyhoo, welcome to the shuttle bay, where nothing shuttles except the fundamentalist transients.
It's not so much the repurposed shuttlecrafts that get me as the tents pitched atop cargo containers for lack of lebensraum. Bleedin'-edge graphics or not, these little details will tell you whether a developer is actively engaged, paying attention to the world being built or merely phoning it in.
I'd been sent to gather allies for my home town but the Church of the Holy Hand Grenade or whatever is suffering its own schism due to an influx of refugees making them look like a juicy conquest to the bigwigs. Buuut, given this is just a taste of faction conflict, it's not really worth discussing yet. My course of action was not dictated by moral but by practical roleplaying choices anyway. To side with the incumbent you'd need... well, all the skills I ain't got. Lacking Smiley's added gunnery, the combat option here proved flat-out impossible, so I ended up taking the upstart's side, which fast-forwards to a relatively (for this game anyway) easy stealth run assassinating an enemy commander.
Aaaand with that we've run out of content for now. Conclusions?
Iron Tower has come a long way in addressing the min/maxing issue from AoD. If combat is the most reliable and diplomacy/stealth the default alternatives, I'm probably betting on the lamest horse by focusing on science. Yet not only have I never yet been completely stumped, I've somehow stumbled into a secondary stealth role by an unforeseen combination of knives and cloaking fields. The same might be true of speech if my DEX/CHA scores were reversed but I can't prove it. I also can't prove my evasion stat is actually doing anything, since enemies never seem to miss me entirely... but then I don't know how often they'd glance/crit me without my evasion either so this rock certainly seems to be keeping the tigers away!
Overall, I'd say get in on this action. While the occasional quality of life feature is begging to be added (e.g. reloading/quitting during dialogue, saving during non-randomized stealth missions where you're just brute-forcing alternate paths) what's there is both creative and multifaceted if you like a challenge, and if I'm not mistaken the price will rise as chapters are added. Yeah, you'll still spend a frustrating number of reloads praying to RNGesus, but then as I said even about the weaker Age of Decadence, it's better to be frustrated than bored.
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