Space Siege (PC)

A game divided against itself
8/26/2008 6:19 PM | 1 Comments | Page 2 of 3

There is no loot to speak of, at least not in traditional role-playing terms. You will find new weapons, of course, but you never go back to an old one once you find something with a bigger bang. There are lots of upgrades and skills for your melée weapon, for example, but considering how rarely you use it, why bother? You're better off putting your skill points into engineering and make tons of cheap grenades or drones to make your job easier. Once you discover a new skill, you will have no trouble taking advantage of it, because learning about stun grenades means you can make stun grenades no matter how puny your investment in engineering.

A couple of tough boss fights aside, the game is pretty easy. There aren't any puzzles to solve, for example, or secret attacking tricks you need to learn. If you want to just run-and-gun, Space Siege isn't a bad choice. The designers and writers seem to have aspired for more, though, and failed to reach their own lofty goals.

This is especially apparent in the human vs. cybernetic debate I mentioned earlier. Every time you install a new part, your humanity level drops, but since your ship is mostly empty, you never get to see what this means. Will people see you differently as a half-human/half-robot monstrosity? Even the Cassandra who warns against this sort of modification seems perfectly content to work with you even as you become more artificial, so I doubt it. The cyborgs you slay don't seem to recognize you as one of them, either, even though the writing and setup assure you that these choices are momentous.

In fact, so much is made of the struggle between cybernetic enhancements and true humanity that I can't help but suspect that part of the game is missing, that someone somewhere ran out of time. This missing center of the game only draws attention to how pedestrian the rest of Space Siege is. You ride a subway to a new location and kill more aliens. You ride an elevator, activate an item and wait for your new orders. The sense of disappointment wouldn't be so acute it Space Siege's developers hadn't spent months talking about the dramatic choices you would have to make in their story. The plot and some items point to this concept being central to the original design, but all we get in the end are corridors of nasties that need to be cleansed.