Space Siege Preview

The editors over at WorthPlaying have cranked out the latest hands-on preview of Gas Powered Games’ Space Siege.

There are quite a few interesting sci-fi touches on the well-worn high-fantasy formula of the Dungeon Siege games here. Instead of amassing gold, you amass parts from defeated enemies. Your protagonist is an engineer, and so he can use these spare parts to level up HR-V, his handy companion robot, or to improve his own weapons. It is feasible to invest so much in HR-V that you spend most of the game letting him do a lot of the fighting for you, while you stand back and take potshots at enemies or spam skills. HR-V and the protagonist have separate HP bars, and it seems easy to make HR-V into something that can easily soak up colossal amounts of damage.

The skill tree in Space Siege is key to the game’s plot, and so what you invest in is a little bit more important than usual. Some skills require your engineer to remain mostly human, while others demand your engineer take on certain cybernetic enhancements. You can easily enhance yourself at any point in the game, but can never un-enhance yourself. The skills that call for enhancements will appear to be more powerful in the short-term game, but investing in a more human character can pay off over the long term in a way that’s equally useful. If you take on more than a certain total percentage of cybernetic enhancements, then your character’s loss of humanity begins to influence the story line. If this sounds a bit like the premise of Silicon Knights’ Too Human to you . well, it is, sans Norse mythology. That said, the way the story plays out feels far truer to the basic man/machine conflict as presented in early sci-fi than its competitor. Both the decision to enhance and not enhance are presented as valid, and this is probably going to encourage some replays.