Upon adding RetroSpace to my Steam library, I was made aware of the fact that the game’s code name is “Retroshock.” Yes, it’s one of those throwback immersive sims that aims to be a spiritual successor to the System Shock games. You wake up on a space station overloaded with mutants and a squirrelly AI and have to journey through various sections of the ship to save it from certain doom; very familiar stuff.
The game is certainly competently put together and has a variety of strong immersive sim elements. Thankfully, there’s considerably more guidance than there was in the original System Shock (even its remake), so it’s never too much of a surprise as to what you’re meant to accomplish and where. This does break down somewhat as the game progresses, sadly, as I really needed a guide at certain points.
There’s just a certain feeling of copypasta going on throughout the game. Enemy variety is mostly quite low (bug-headed mutants, androids, and plant people, depending on which section of the ship you’re in), and the systems you can interact with are similar. You’ll find codes, keycards, and severed heads to open doors while frantically looting everything around you for multiple types of currency.
These currencies include cash (duh), scrap (which you’ll find all over while also being able to turn most things you pick up into it), and genes that you’ll acquire from using your Genesucker on fallen foes, weird coloured-piles, and on your own corpses. Yes, RetroSpace basically uses the whole Vitachamber concept again. You die, and you’ll respawn nearby with full health and all of your gear on you.
The variable here is that when you wake up, you’ll have a gene mutation. These are random and include flu symptoms that cause you to sneeze and alert nearby enemies, and several others that I can’t recall since they’re so minor they’re hardly even inconveniences. This was added to make death seem a bit more impactful, and you can have up to three at once, but it really doesn’t make much of a difference since the effects go away as soon as you suck the genes out of your own corpse.
Combat in RetroSpace isn’t very good, but it’s on par with the System Shock games for the most part. You have melee weapons, including a wrench and a rarely found motorized broom, and you can freely sneak up behind enemies and bash them to death without much issue. There’s also an assortment of guns, which typically have copious ammo all over, plus you can level all your weapons up using blueprints.
There are even Mutamods that you equip to give yourself active and passive abilities. These can basically turn you into an unstoppable god, such as the one that strengthens your melee attacks and defence while holding a melee weapon, one that heals you as long as you’re in the light, and one that just straight-up gives you extra lives. A game where you instantly respawn upon death didn’t need all these extra safety nets at all.
Therefore, most of the challenge rests in figuring out what to do, which is almost always “go to x sector and interact with a device” or something similar. It can be difficult to tell exactly where you’re meant to go, though, so having a guide handy for these occasions is helpful, especially once you reach the seven-ish hour mark and you mostly run out of new areas to explore.
Instead, the game just has you run back and forth between places you’ve already been, including in an alternate timeline. It feels like padding, and the entire last act of the game is so desperate to stretch itself out that it gives you more than one fetch quest chain to make things take longer, all so you can make a purely binary choice at the end. There are a few side quests you can participate in, but these don’t make much of a difference and will only increase the amount of running around you have to do.
This would all be far more tolerable if the immersive sim elements were more interesting, but things are mostly par for the course here. You can shoot electrical panels and put water on the floor to shock enemies, use keycodes to turn turrets friendly, or brainwash enemies with a late-game Mutamod, but it all feels mostly interchangeable. It doesn’t help that many of the ship sections all feel a bit too samey.
As for the story, the presentation is pretty acceptable. Important bits are impressively voiced, the backstory is fleshed out, and the characters are even fairly memorable. Unfortunately, the game outright borrows its main twist from one of the Shock games, which I found legitimately confounding.
If this sounds too harsh, the game is undoubtedly decent. It’s all a side effect of a small dev (the game is mostly designed by a single person) biting off a bit more than they can chew. In the end, I still think the dev made a more playable game than the System Shock remake, and I had a solid time with it. I just wish it had a bit more in the way of unique ideas and didn’t pad the game out in the end.
RetroSpace: Solid albeit unnecessarily padded, RetroSpace is a System Shock spiritual successor that gets enough right to be worth a look. – Andrew Farrell
Your next read:
System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster PC review — All hands on deck |
