The Precursors Review

The digital release of Precursors in English a week ago passed by with little fanfare so we haven’t seen much in the review department. Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Wot I think is the first I’ve seen, listing a series of minor and major issues for a “rich, incoherent game”.

The visual design of the game is all over the place. It’s never ugly, as such, but the sci-fi theme often meanders off into the hideously garish and kitsch, particularly in space, where it’s all glowing lasers, swooshing comets, and spinning warp portals. There are times, however, when the game looks spectacular the starting city is lovely, and the desert beyond is as full of life and detail as any large game environment you might care to mention. The level of incidental and ambient detail is often quite extraordinary: cleaning robots pootle about in hallways, harmless bugs scurry about in the dusty streets, people go about their business. As sci-fi worlds go, it might not feel mature, but it almost always feels alive. (Except perhaps in the jungle, where it really was a bit stiff and cardboardy, but oh well.) It’s never particularly sexy or accomplished all the art in the game feels like you’ve seen it before. It’s a sci-fi vision that seems to have been cobbled together from the scrap-heap remained of a dozen other gaming worlds.

So yes, we’re getting to those problems. The worst of these is that the combat simply isn’t very good. It’s not broken, but it is perfunctory and often dogged by frame-rate horrors. Most enemies take too many hits to go down, which is an endless issue in these kinds of games. There’s no lean. The general jerkiness of performance made some fights a special kind of grind, and I had to put on my mirror-shades of journalistic determination to get through them. But the nature of the world means that even these issues start to erode when you see what is possible within the tools that you are provided with. In one fight, for example, I was ambushed by bandits. These buggers were a scripted event, but on the second time we fought they managed to accidentally aggro some kind of desert-gorilla lizards that I’d been in a fight with previously. Being outgunned by both sides, I jumped in a jeep, let the gorillas kill the bandits, and then ran over the gorillas in the jeep. Then I got down to looting. (Everyone and everything in Precursors can be looted.) I’m not saying these kinds of situations arise all the time in Precursors, just that it’s a wide open enough game in places that they can happen.