Developer: Outlier
Publisher: Jagex Ltd
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
This Means Warp – Review
It’s hard to keep track of all the party games we have tried over the course of the last few years, but it seems that developers are still trying their hand at the genre to bring new content to genre enthusiasts. We have reviewed a few party games with a space theme before, such as Catastronauts! and Fueled Up, and This Means Warp will be the next one to add to that list. We were hoping This Means Warp would offer the same entertainment value as the highly-addictive Catastronauts, as Fueled Up proved to be a very bland experience. This Means Warp, however, moves away from the traditional format of the aforementioned titles and offers a Roguelike experience instead, albeit with the same intense party gameplay.
Story
This Means Warp has basically one storyline in all of its scenarios, and this revolves around alien invaders, the Norg, posing a threat to intergalactic peace. The plot does develop a bit as you progress through the scenarios, but the overall story value is very low. We would have loved a bit more creativity from the developers when playing through different scenarios.
Graphics
Graphically This Means Warp is rather underwhelming. The game looks very rough around the edges and most of the game’s assets look like they were made for a game that’s nearly a decade old. Of course, the party game genre does allow for more simplistic graphics, but the game looked a bit unfinished. There was also very little variety when it came to the enemy spaceships, which became painfully noticeable when having to fight the same enemy craft several times in a row for different encounters. The dialogue screens are also presented in a very simplistic fashion, but this bothered us a lot less than the overall graphical prowess during the actual gameplay segments.
Sound
The game’s sound design is okay, but it’s nothing to write home about. The music is fairly entertaining, but the limited soundtrack does get old fairly quickly. The sound effects provide proper feedback for the onscreen action, but we mainly regretted our characters being voiceless digital puppets. We would have loved it if there were a few voice lines present in the game, or if there was a bit more variety in the game’s soundscape.
Gameplay
This Means Warp is a Roguelike Party game in which you’ll have to defend your spaceship during different encounters. You’ll be frantically running around to repair damage, extinguish fires, reload weapons, supply batteries and, of course, shoot enemy vessels. Things are rather straightforward, as the game only uses a few button commands. The game has different scenarios you can play through, but they all boil down to the same thing: survive as long as possible or until you beat said scenario.
As you progress through each of the scenarios, you’ll find new weapons and other devices you can use in your ship. You’ll find small shields you can deploy, you can shoot bombs at enemy vessels or you can even board them. This does add a bit of variety to the mix, but all in all, the game remains fairly simple from start to finish. You’ll also find passive upgrades for all of these devices, either to add damage, health, cooldown reduction, and so on.
As a whole, even though the controls are simple, we found everything to be very clunky. We found the controls to be fairly unresponsive and sometimes also very imprecise, which often resulted in permanent damage to our ship. In This Means Warp, even when you fix broken parts, you might not be able to recover your vessel’s hull (HP). The latter was at times also very unfair, as in many cases it was impossible to reach broken parts of the ship to avoid said permanent damage. Even when investing max stats in movement speed, we were often unable to reach locations in time. This did somewhat drag the experience down.
On top of the somewhat clunky controls and simplistic nature of the game, we found certain design choices a bit lazy. Each scenario is basically the same, albeit with a few fixed conditions you need to respect. Sadly, the story is the same in all of these scenarios, and the game does not offer that much incentive to keep playing through all of them.
One honorable mention does go to the companion AI in the game. If you cannot muster together a full party for your crew, the game will set up encounters where you find AI crewmates. You can instruct these AI crew members on what they should do. You’ll get a list of tasks they can perform automatically, and you can select which tasks they keep performing or which ones they need to skip. You can, for example, instruct the AI to occupy itself with repairs or reloading the weapons, while you focus on other tasks. We found the AI companions to be very useful and efficient.
Conclusion
This Means Warp certainly has its moments, and the game can be a lot of fun with friends, but as a whole, it’s filled with so many missed opportunities. While there is an enjoyable gameplay loop to be found, the game suffers from an extreme lack of variety, very clunky controls, and some unfair gameplay elements. As it stands now, this one can be entertaining for genre enthusiasts, but we still recommend waiting for a sale. Don’t get us wrong, the game isn’t bad, it’s just a bit bland.
This Means Warp - Review,
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