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| Ground Control to Major Miner. |
Miner Wars is a game about mining. But in space. Imagine if Descent made crazy space-babies with Red Faction, and then went to beat up some space-rocks Gameplay primarily involves flying around, shooting spaceships, and making your fortune by pulling expensive shiny rocks from enormous asteroids, which you break open with vast quantities of explosives. Right now, it's in pre-alpha. The tech is there, the spaceships fly, and the asteroids are destroyable, but there's not much in the way of game to play yet. That said, if you feel bold and/or supportive, you can put 10 euros down on the game now and get it at a (theoretical, assuming it gets a full release) major discount. Additional thoughts and some official gameplay/trailer videos after the jump.
As for personal impressions, I decided to risk it all and spend my last 10 Euros on this game. Now, doomed to a cold, starvation-hastened death, I shall share my final gems of wisdom:
This one has potential. That was the first thing that sprung to mind, and it's the one thing that keeps buzzing away at the back of my head. Right now, there really isn't much to play with. The current build is a pre-alpha, which means it's still very early in development, but while it may lack notable playable content, all the elements are there and ready to be tied together into a coherent whole.
From the moment I began mucking around, I immediately felt a pang of nostalgia. The developers were clearly fans of old space-shippy FPS Descent. Controls are simple and intuitive - FPS standards, for the most part, and configurable to your personal preferences, with the additional complications of thrust up/down and roll commands. Initially disorienting if you're not used to space-based games like this, but it's about as simple and accessible as spaceflight can get. For those wanting to pay more respect to Sir Isaac Newton (the most dangerous sonovabitch in all of space), you can disable flight-assistance, meaning that you'll fly constantly in the direction of thrust unless countered by an opposite force.
The test-map contains several large asteroids of varying shapes, sizes and mineral compositions, and a few man-made stations, patrolled by industrious-yet-oblivious teams of generic AI drones. Scattered around are a few hostile bots as well, which will put some dents in your ship and crack your windscreen, but there's not much they can do, as you can't die at this point. They can, however. Your initial ship loadout includes a basic dual-vulcan-cannon setup (for dogfighting) and a practically inexhaustible supply of rockets (for blowing holes in space-rocks). I reiterate that there's no real gameplay here or drive to progress - it's just the engine and the core essentials of interaction with the game-world.
The graphics are solid. Not mindblowing, by any stretch of the imagination, but it feels authentic, for want of a better word. The asteroids themselves look jagged, rough and unwelcoming, and the illumination from your ships headlight glitters off the rocks with just the right level of sci-fi believability. It also runs silky-smooth at maximum detail on mediocre mid-range PC. Most importantly, tech-wise, is the terrain deformation - the star of the show, and what everything seems to revolve around. So long as it's not armored and man-made, you can not only break it, but you can pulverise it into dust or carve it into entirely new shapes. Your rapid-fire mining cannon can vaporize rock at quite comical rates (presumably it will be toned down somewhat later), and you can carve your way through a kilometer of solid stone in a few moments, then fly through the tunnel you made and marvel at your handiwork. As a notable aside, so can the wandering AI's, able to navigate these structures quite deftly, despite them not existing mere moments prior.
It looks, sounds and feels right already, even if there's nothing to actually do yet. It's a solid framework to hang a game from. The developers plan to implement a solo campaign mode, an MMO-style persistent online mode, and a sandbox mode for freelance exploration and profiteering. With a little work and a following solar wind, I think they might just pull it off.
Feel free to comment, question or harangue in the comments-box below. You know you want to.
3 comments:
Sounds like it'll be a load of fun if they flesh it all out, and it seems like something I'd definitely be interested in. However, this worries me:
http://www.minerwars.com/ForumTopic.aspx?id=95
I personally don't worry too much about the DRM side of things. Like they say in that thread, it's going to be primarily an MMO, with an optional solo element. If 90% of the game is based around that online side of things, then it's par for the course.
Now they've got to *prove* that it works primarily as a large-scale multiplayer game, rather than a solo romp.
One thing I do recall reading is that singleplayer/multiplayer are joined somehow. If you can take your solo character and all associated perks straight into online play, that's a pretty good reason to have stuff running server-side.
It's all theoretical at this point, anyway. Game won't be out anytime soon.
Those trailers looked pretty cool. I will definetly be paying the 14 bucks for the pre alpha. it seems like it has huge potential to even compete with something like wow. its not so much a nich game as a genre game. i believe it can do very well if they iimplement the mmo side of it right. i forsee the biggest conflict as being getting a good story oiut of it and having it make sense.
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