Empyrion might be worth $10 if you enjoy survival games in general and are willing to spend money on future potential.
Here's the tl;dr: It's a mediocre Space Engineers clone that does everything SE does except worse or more limited, and tacks on a bunch of generic survival game standards (exp bar, food + hydration meter, &c.) to try to differentiate itself from SE.
The greatest difficulty I had in my time playing Empyrion was navigating the menus, which are all helpfully labeled with X-Com standard-issue vague blurry image buttons. It had an extensive tutorial to explain the most basic elements of the game (get food, make weapon, build shit) because it's not really evident how to do any of that.
The construction: Like SE, except shitty and more like Minecraft. You have intermediate components, but since you craft everything in your magic crafting tube and place equipment + blocks as finished, sealed products directly from your toolbar those basically only exist to force you to do a bunch of extra clicks in the crafting menu. Has the same weak-metal/strong-metal dynamic, except you can also make blocks out of ~wood~.
The resourcing: Literally just a less precise SE drill with the addition of standard-survival-game food/medicine-dispenser plants that you can pick from. Oh, and you have a free in-built super-long-ranged ore detector which automatically waypoints all deposits for you. And a free Troncycle that doesn't consume any resources whatsoever so you can go basically anywhere you want on the planet without risk, major time expenditure, or needing to build your own vehicle.
The combat: But wait! Empyrion has combat! With more than three total weapons and actual enemy types instead of flying turret platforms!
Yes. And the enemy AI consists entirely of conga-lining directly towards you after detection until they die or get in range to attack, at which point they sit there attacking until they die or you move out of range. Oh, and the guns have no reactivity at all. You can't tell that you're firing apart from a slight sound and occasional pixels of blood. I genuinely couldn't even tell if the guns were hitscan or modeled projectile, if there was drop, &c. because you get so little feedback from the game. Also the random naked lizardmen with spears take close to twice the damage to kill as the basic armored flying drones. -_-
Not to mention other issues. There's no sprint animation unless you count the bottom of the screen tearing as your model clips through the camera's perspective an animation. You get a free resourceless jetpack which is cool and all but isn't Empyrion's thing supposed to be that it's a survival game?
--
The bottom line: Empyrion is billed as a more combat and survival-oriented Space Engineers, but it does a shit job at the former and is actually worse at the latter while also being worse at everything SE does well. But hey, maybe your ship's turrets won't track and shoot through it at enemies. To be blunt, I played 3079 blind a decent amount soon after the early releases started coming out, and that was less confusing than navigating Empyrion's basic menus. SE's opening hours on a new character are both more challenging (sadly enough) and vastly more intuitive than Empyrion's.
Stereotypical Early Access survival game material, in other words. If I want space and construction I'll play SE. If I want combat I'll play Rust or ArmA III: Exile. Empyrion is very JoaT as such games go, and it shows. Maybe it'll be a wine, maybe it'll be milk, we'll see.
Author
Topic: SALES Thread (Read 1482305 times)