GOL Cast: Exploring Space And Meeting Aliens In Interstellaria

Do you want to explore space and become a great hero? Well, let's see what this recently released space exploration RPG adventure game called Interstellaria has in store!

Interstellaria by Coldrice Games and published by Chucklefish is an indie adventure RPG strategy game in which you command a ship or a whole fleet of ships on a mission to figure out who is behind the mysterious abductions that have been happening on various worlds. You need to travel from planet to planet in search for clues and information and will meet new alien races in the process and discover the history of the galaxy.


Interstellaria is an attempt to bring back the style of old space games such as Starflight and I have to say, my first impressions of the game were quite good. The story started out very nicely and the mechanics of the game seemed quite solid and interesting.

Space combat, which is a thing you will quickly encounter in Interstellaria is sort of like FTL in that you need to move your crew around to fix hull leaks, put out fires and man various stations on your ship. But it spices the combat up by making you plan the maneuvers of your ship on a 2D battlefield which also quite often has some cover in the form of asteroids. You will have to utilize this cover and find good places to fire your weapons while avoiding enemy fire. The battles can get quite intense, especially when you get hit and need to move crew around to repair your ship while you continue dodging missiles at the same time.

Another big feature of Interstellaria is visiting planets. After the tutorial part of the game nearly all of the galaxy is made accessible to you. You can basically go anywhere you want right from the get-go. However, the game isn't quite as non-linear as you would be fooled into thinking. A good portion of the planets are completely empty and meaningless and the few planets that have little more than a trading post have a good bit of their content locked until you go there at the right time. No side-quests, interesting loot or random adventures as far as I know. There are maybe a handful of places that will give you some useful loot (hint: go check out Earth when you can) but otherwise you have no reason to go there unless told to. The game actually is very linear and straying from the path is nearly useless.

And then there are the planets themselves. Landing on planets was made to seem like a big deal by the game's website and store page and you end up doing that quite a lot during your journey. But sadly it isn't all that great. Nothing interesting happens on these planets and all of them play out more or less the same way. You land, possibly find a quest, kill all of the wild life and harvest resources. Harvesting resources has been automated, which I am thankful for, so you don't have to micromanage your crew to get all of the ore, herbs, food and equipment that is lying around. How about the quests then? This is also a department where the game fails quite badly. All of the quests are like they are from an MMO. Find X amount of Y, kill these critters, find this person and talk to him. These quests are mostly mandatory and progression requires you to complete them. I was once sent by a quest giver to the same place 3 times to do mostly the same thing. That was made worse by the fact that the enemies respawn after you leave an area, so I ended up killing the same enemies 3 times, collecting the same resources 3 times and feeling more and more bored after each time going there. It was tedious and not even a single bit of fun. It would have been better if ground combat was actually fun, but it really isn't. You take your crew, click on an enemy, they duke it out for a while and, unless you run, one side comes out victorious. The AI path finding also has issues, so you occasionally have your crew get stuck because they cannot figure out how to jump over a hole or something silly like that.

The difficulty of the game also seems quite weird. On planets the enemies can actually get quite scary and dangerous but in space I haven't really had any trouble with the hostile ships. I have never felt the need to have more than one ship and I haven't really upgraded my weaponry a whole lot. I decided to replace my old corvette with a frigate to get more power and shields but that was about it. If you have enough skills maneuvering the ship around, you won't really have trouble against even the bigger ships. Of course killing the enemies will take some time with the default gatling guns but it's definitely possible and quite easy. On planets you don't really have any way to be “good” at combat other than by finding better weapons than armor, so that is that. But you can often kite the enemies and use ledges to hit the enemies and climb away from their grasp and repeat. It seems to be quite tough to find better weapons for your crew but armor is plentiful. Thus my crew mostly relies on standard pistols and one shotgun.

The game also has had some technical problems. The game has crashed on me once which lead to lost progress and I've seen some annoying bugs. The Steam forums have reported even more bugs and it seems our magnificent Liam also encountered a bug that broke the game in the tutorial. So the game hasn't really arrived in the best possible condition. The devs have been quick to release bug fixes and there have been 6 already since the release.

However, in the audio-visual department the game is actually quite cool. The chiptune soundtrack is quite nice and the pixel art isn't too bad either. The backgrounds on planets should have been a bit more detailed in my opinion but the rest of the art was nice to look at. The game also seems to be rather long, 10+ hours, so there is plenty of stuff to do here.

I really wanted to like this game. I really did. While writing this review I've actually thought a lot if I'm being too harsh. I've felt the need to go back to the game but I cannot lie, each time I've gone back has reinforced my criticism of the game. The game could have been really good and it has many features and mechanics that are really cool. But what breaks it is all of the planet side stuff and the linearity. It's not a terrible game but it's tedious to the point of me not wanting to recommend it. I can definitely see the appeal to some people and the majority of people on Steam seem to like the game. But personally I consider the game to be too tedious to be enjoyable as a whole. If the planet side mechanics were redesigned it would be a lot more enjoyable.

Get it from GOG: http://www.gog.com/game/interstellaria

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.