A review - Interesting but flawed

[ShaggyMoose]

I defeated the alien menace after 12 hours and had seriously mixed feelings about the game. That is why I am posting here instead of writing a review, because I don't want to give a straight thumbs up or thumbs down.

The this post contains spoilers!

Overall, I really appreciated that the developer was trying to do something different. Certainly I have never played anything quite like this game and I have been playing games for 35+ years. Despite the flaws, I felt I got value and enjoyment out of the game (I believe it was $5), but if I had purchased it for the regular price of $20 I might feel differently. It was disappointing that there were so things that almost came together in an incredible way, but the execution just didn't come off. I would love to see the concept revisited with lessons learnt and a huge budget to really deliver on the vision.

From a gameplay perspective, the game felt like a blend of Giants: Citizen Kabuto (asymmetric races, army based land-battles, humour) and X-COM Interceptor (tug-of-war strategic campaign, frantic space battles, ship upgrades and commander role).

Pros:

• I felt the primary elements (land, space and commander) generally worked well together and didn't feel like barely related "mini-games". There was a great sense of urgency throughout the game. Being at a station when it unexpectedly comes under attack and watching all the fighters scramble in real time was a great moment!
  
• I really enjoyed the aesthetic of the game, despite the lack of graphical flashiness. The different factions were well defined from a visual standpoint. Overall, the "space opera" feel was pulled off quite well with the developers apparently limited resources.
  
• I played the Wyr and the "so, how you doin?" from the Wyr starbases and other irreverent banter always made me chuckle. Its unfortunate I can't see myself playing through again to experiment with the other races.
  
• My initial impressions of the land and space battles were great. Lots of things happening, lots of independent action, a great feeling of large scale battles. The space battles in particular were frantic, ships and lasers everywhere and a sense of urgency to destroy the enemy as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, this feeling didn't last much past the first few battles...
  
• The tutorial hints and occasional warnings were surprising relevant. In the early game, they often pointed me in the right direction just when I needed them. In other games, these types of hints often come up in loading screens and are usually so irrelevant and out of context that I completely ignore them. This turned out to be a double edged sword though; I never read the help (which I probably should have) and I missed some critical hints that only seemed to come up once (observatories, communications, teleportation). I didn't end up contacting other factions to sue for peace until they were all basically screwed...

Cons:

• The random and limited feel to the strategy layer. It really felt like all sides were just randomly attacking things in serial order (no simultaneous attacks allowed) and the outcomes were unpredictable. It would have been helpful if there was some way to better control the structure of the war effort. e.g. If attacks on planets couldn't bypass starbases, or if wormholes could be blockaded, or supply lines were an issue. A level of complexity was missing.
  
• In the land based battles in particular, the feeling of attacking or being attacked was completely underwhelming. Nothing felt like it had weight, all animations were canned and often looked inappropriate and clipping issues abounded. It was like watching a bunch of tele-tubbies running around bumping into each other.
  
• The AI was severely limited. In the land battles, I could see the AI attempts to occasionally flank or flee in a haphazard way, but generally everything just ran straight at you and got kited until they died. The only time you were ever really in any danger was charging in without any support or getting surrounded. Having to destroy each of the installations one by one on every world was terribly repetitive and made me tire of this even more quickly. In the space battles, there was really only one behaviour; make distance, turn around, shoot while not being attacked, launch a missile, rinse and repeat. If attacked during this cycle, they would break off, perform evasive manoeuvres for a few seconds, then go back to the routine. It turned space battles from exciting into a dull duck shoot. I imagine the gap between what the developer envisaged for this and the actual gameplay were sadly divergent.
  
• All of the elements above combined to create a quite spectacular grind... I had seen pretty much everything the game had to offer in the first two hours and there was ten more hours of it. Practically nothing changed in that time, except that I found it was quicker just to let the enemy destroy things and rebuild them rather than committing to yet another 10+ minute battle that would ultimately prove pointless. The alien world missions were a welcome distraction, but unfortunately not a very engaging one.

So many kudos to the developer for doing something different and interesting, hope it turns out better next time.

EDIT: Repeated myself once or twice...

[JabberwockyX]

Thanks for writing that up, Shaggy.

[ShaggyMoose]

Originally posted by JabberwockyX:

Thanks for writing that up, Shaggy.

I made the assumption a few times that the game didn't quite match the vision. Would be interested to know your opinion on this. Am I wrong? Happy to continue this conversation in a less public forum if needs be.

[JabberwockyX]

Well, vision is a pretty high level thing. The vision for Salvation Prophecy was to create a space epic that combined both planet and space battles within an overarching galactic war. In that sense, yes I do believe I achieved the vision. But you might mean something different by "vision" than I do. My interpretation from reading your review (and I could be wrong) is that your issues have more to do with the execution.

Your feedback is legit, and you presented it well. So I'm not trying to disagree or debate the individual points.

I do notice one thing about people who don't jive with the game. They often compare individual aspects of Salvation Prophecy to AAA games. For example, your strategy critique is totally legit, especially if you're looking for something approaching the depth of a pure strategy game. And I agree, the animations don't compare with AAA shooters from the same period. I did underestimate how often people would take issue with this, and that's my fault as the designer. That being said, there were many people who really liked the game as well.

It was a conscious decision to combine the 3 genres (shooter, space sim, strategy). This is a very hard thing to do. In some ways, it's even harder than making 3 separate games, because of how the different layers of the game need to interact. This adds a lot of both design and technical complexity.

I knew to make this work, each of these 3 genre elements would need to be pretty simple. Whether people are ok with this (and still found it fun) is probably one of the most significant factors separating the people who liked the game from those who didn't.

One of the very few other games that combined genres like Salvation Prophecy is EA's Spore. Which had the biggest studio in the world (EA), one of the best designers in the world (Will Wright), and still went over budget and was delayed. I think it took them 8 years to make it. With easily way over 100x the budget I had. Even still, each of Spore's multiple genres were quite simple, and actually interacted less than they do in Salvation Prophecy. I just mention this to reinforce that these kind of games are very hard to make, and they never work out as perfect and polished as a single-genre game.

So yeah, there's no doubt that if I'd just made a pure shooter, it would have been a way better shooter than the shooter in Salvation Prophecy. Same if it had been a pure space sim. Or a pure strategy game. It's a legitimate question of whether I just simply tried to do too much in Salvation Prophecy. And perhaps I should have focused on one particular aspect instead. That would have created a more polished experience, less susceptible to legitimate criticism. But then, it wouldn't have matched the vision I was trying to attain. I've said before, Salvation Prophecy's greatest strength (the interleaved genres) is also is biggest weakness.

In the end, I'm proud of the game. I took a lot of big risks. I learned a lot by making it. And a big part of that is reading feedback like yours, Shaggy, as well as others who reviewed the game more favorably.

[ShaggyMoose]

Originally posted by JabberwockyX:

Well, vision is a pretty high level thing. The vision for Salvation Prophecy was to create a space epic that combined both planet and space battles within an overarching galactic war. In that sense, yes I do believe I achieved the vision. But you might mean something different by "vision" than I do. My interpretation from reading your review (and I could be wrong) is that your issues have more to do with the execution.

I would agree with that. Execution is probably a more appropriate word in this context.

Originally posted by JabberwockyX:

In the end, I'm proud of the game. I took a lot of big risks. I learned a lot by making it. And a big part of that is reading feedback like yours, Shaggy, as well as others who reviewed the game more favorably.

You should be proud. You took a new practically untried concept and made a workable and interesting game out of it. So please don't consider my review as completely unfavourable; there were as many positives as negatives. In some ways, the scope of the game reminds me of Star Citizen. It would have been interesting to see what could have been delivered in Salvation Prophecy for $100m! Actually, it will be interesting to see what they can deliver for that...