BugZy's Review: Duskers - A game of drones

[BugZy]

Misfits Attic, the developers and publishers of Duskers, have kindly given us a key to review their game. Any opinions are strictly my own.

At first sight, Duskers looks like something that you would scroll past, not thinking twice and, if you did happen to think twice and decide to take a closer look at it, you would most likely think “this looks rubbish, I would never play it and it sure as hell doesn’t look like it’s worth twenty dollars.” Although that is an unfair assumption on what may be a very interesting game, we are all guilty of it. Even your neighbor’s cat. This game is a very good example of the common phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover,” because even though you may think it looks old and boring, it is far from it.

Upon launch you are greeted by a menu that looks like command prompt, or the interface of an extremely old computer. Extremely old. Think dinosaurs, then think before that. That old. The interface is relatively easy to navigate, that is all I can really say. It doesn’t support mouse input, but with all the shortcuts it is very easy to get use to pressing “P” to play. There isn’t much visual detail, but really, you can’t add detail to something that isn’t meant to be detailed.

The next thing you will be greeted by is the map screen, and I would like to point out that after several hours of playing, the game is huge. It took me thirty minutes to get through all of the abandoned ships in one area, then I had to jump to a different one. The second one had twice as many ships to explore, which were more difficult so that took about an hour and thirty minutes. The third took even longer and so on. It is in no way a small game. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

The gist of the story is that you are a human stranded in the middle of nowhere, using a computer to remotely pilot some drones into infested ships, trying to gather fuel and scrap to make more trips to more ships whilst trying not to lose your drones to what lurks inside. You hear and see what your bots hear and see through equipment from the 70s, which baffled me a bit at first. At first I thought “space exploration is very clearly a thing of the future, especially travelling through galaxies. It has been nearly fifty years since we first sent man to the moon. We haven’t gone much further than the moon. Where we stand in the tree of technology has come extraordinarily far. Add a few generations onto that and we are exploring other galaxies and supposedly, we are using microphones, monitors and interfaces from the 70s. #RantOver.”

I was very wrong to think that, because after actually playing the game, I realised that if it weren’t for the old timey feel of the game, Duskers wouldn’t be the beauty that it is.

You control your drones and the surrounding parts of the ship you are searching using commands. For example, d1 opens up “door 1,” navigate 1 r3 orders “drone 1” to navigate to “room 3,” etc. The game consists mainly of these sorts of commands unless you’re manually controlling your drones, which you will need to do frequently to make sure you can easily assist your drone’s escape if it gets into a pickle.

Don’t worry, you won’t be restricted to the two examples above for the whole game. They are the commands that you will most likely use the most as they are essential commands, but your bots also come with upgrades. Upgrades add features to your robots, such as generator which has one of your drones use a power inlet to feed power to the surrounding doors, rooms and interfaces, motion which detects enemy motion in the surrounding rooms and drone’s best friend, tow which allows the towing of almost dead drones and other objects back to airlock 1 to return to your ship, and a bunch more that I can’t fit into one review. You can obtain more upgrades by swapping with dead drones that you can find in derelict ships.

The infestation is the game’s backbone, what makes it suspenseful and exciting, what makes opening a door scary and what you must constantly be checking for. This is the reason motion is drone’s best friend, because if you don’t check before you open a door and there is an enemy behind it, your mechanical pals might not be coming back. Ever. Duskers being a rogue-like makes it even scarier, one wrong move and you have to start all over again.

There are more threats than just the infestation, such as security drones which are just as bad, drone swarms which you should steer clear of at all costs, bacterium which multiplies towards you and leapers, which as their descriptive name states, lunge towards you dealing immense amounts of damage. There are also environmental threats such as the vacuum of opening an airlock causing your drones and enemies to fly out of the room, and radiation, caused by having an airlock or doors blocking already irradiated rooms open for an extended period of time.

Don’t worry, hope is not lost if you are in a situation that is going downhill faster than a fat man on a bobsled, there are ways to keep your drones from being destroyed by organic and mechanical life. If you needed to get the enemies out of the room fast, you can use the “Sonic” upgrade, which sends out a sonic pulse that repels organic threats. Maybe you want to attract enemies from nearby rooms to get their attention so you can explore the room they are occupied in, which is when the “Lure” upgrade comes in handy. You can drop a remotely detonated explosive device to blast the threat to pieces if you have the “Trap” upgrade, but if worse comes to worst, which is bound to happen eventually, you can use the “Shield” upgrade which negates incoming damage to the drone that has it equipped (not completely, but maybe just enough to buy you some time.)

If you think you’ll have trouble and need a bit of reassurance, there is a “Difficulty Options” section under “Options” where you can change a bunch of stuff. I suggest you don’t, because it takes away the difficult and original “Duskers feel,” but it’s there if you want it.

Duskers doesn’t have save/load points, instead it overwrites the other save points with the current one. There is no way to save to an external file so you can re-load if you think you might lose some drones in a ship or have misclicked on something and spent half your scrap fixing a drone you wanted to trash. That means if you make a mistake, you can say goodbye to your game. I ended up accidentally travelling to a ship I had already explored before. Whoops! Bye bye two days worth of fuel.

The game is astonishingly (and surprisingly) atmospheric, which I believe to be one of the key elements in any game. Duskers is a great example of something that can be as simple as “controlling some robots through a screen that the 70s thought the future of technology was going to look like” being this amazing.

Overall Duskers has impressed me a lot and I’m sure if you get past the common first glance scenario it’ll impress you too. There are a few minor issues here and there but if you get past them Duskers is truly an awesome game. It is an experience you won’t forget any time soon, I certainly won’t.

I rate Duskers 9/10 Australian flags.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/254320/

[Bind Brisken]

Best metaphors in a review. And you're right about it looking not great, but now I want to play it too!

[Gurg]

Same here Brisken! :D

[Wheezy XL]

Awesome review, looks like a very fun game :)