Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Website: http://www.soldak.com/Drox-Operative/Overview.html
Price: 19.99 USD
Blurb: “Drox Operative is a starship action RPG with warring alien races, fierce space battles, a dynamic, evolving galaxy, and co-op multiplayer for Windows, Mac, and Linux.“
After the longest description from a website so far, let us dive into the actual game. This is a top down Elite, or Diablo in space with 4x elements, but, instead of you colonizing planets and harvesting resources, you influence, terrorize, coerce, spy and so forth. Mmm… on second thought, maybe you are the CIA in space. You start off picking a race, however, this only determines your bonuses and nothing else really. You can ‘try before you buy’ – which I think is great – here: http://www.soldak.com/Drox-Operative/demo.html
What it is not – even though I grabbed the game thinking it was another Ascendancy – it is not a 4x game. There is a 4x game being run in the background by the AI, but you are only one ship, with missions to take, kick ass and chew bubblegum, even though bubblegum went out of fashion 2 centuries ago.
Which brings me to the graphics. In terms of Soldak games, this is one of their better ones, but the artists still lack imagination. All the “ships” look alike except for one, all the races even look alike, right out of star trek 1977, just different colour make up. Being in space I suppose the background does not interfere with the foreground as much. (but it can still get overwhelming) If you played Kivi, one of their other games, you will know what I mean, characters get lost against the background. The UI design is in line with their other games and just makes it as functional.
If you look at the screen-shot, you will see three ‘health’ bars, top left. Blue is shield power, green is structural integrity and yellow is power. For combat, this is what you will need to manage. The bottom part is quick slots and cargo and top right is the mini map. All fairly standard, with a gorgeous background, but notice how my ship almost disappears. The pace of the game is also much faster than previous Soldak games, so that is great. The downside is there is a lot of grind, no real story and little brainfood in the reward tree. This game needs a grand space opera story with unlocking story elements for reward points and it would take it out of the mediocre category. Now don’t get me wrong – the game is not mediocre in gameplay, it is actually fun, it is just that there is no rhyme or reason, other than to beat the game six ways. Yes, there are six ways to win. However I can’t see myself being bothered. Ten hours in and I am already bored. I see the same old-same old, wherever I go. This is the only issue I have with all Soldak’s games, Din included. It is like the company belongs to a family and the son is the sales manager and the daughter the creative manager and so forth. They can’t do any wrong and the end product suffers for it. Let me quickly point one out, all the races have crew +2 perk.(so why even bother?) You need to have constraints and balances. The weapons are all the same, they all do the same damage, they even all look the same and sound the same. I can see there was a lot of effort put into the game, but it is almost like the budget dried up. There is so much potential here. On the one side I am worried these guys plan another Hearts of Iron, where there are endless DLC to milk the players.
If you were hoping to win the game by diplomacy, know that there is no real diplomacy, you have to do missions for a race to increase diplomacy, and that’s it. So currently I have a love-hate relationship with this game.
The mechanics also need work, you cannot play “smartly”, I got caught in an ambush and high tailed it out, crossing a minefield hoping it would affect the other ships too, but no, they only affect you. The minefield was next to a planet of one faction – presumably placed by that faction to protect their planet, yet every other faction can fly through it, even the ones they are at war with, but me. It reminded me of the new Bond movie, where he has this terribly powerful EMP in his watch, that will fry a guy's bionic eye, but ignores the cellphone in Bond’s pocket and the transceiver in his ear and the “smart blood” in his veins. (all that, to make a terrible pun). Also do not expect great trading or intricate combat. Even your overlord missions will sometimes be in another star system you don’t even know about, never mind the faction missions. ‘Protect person Y from planet A to B, but you haven’t discovered planet A or B and person Y dies a minute later? Or things that have no purpose – paying or not paying your crew, the happiness stat is affected, but does not do anything. Would you continue working if your boss did not pay you?
So if you just want to mess around and not think too much about the game, give it a spin, but I would say only at $9, not $19. As I said, the game has a LOT of potential, if they fix that and make it a bit more engaging, I would pay the $19 with a smile.
As you can see from the screen-shot the “help” is a bunch of big green question marks that march across the screen, and don’t go away after reading. UI design, UI design, UI design…