Developer: Fenix Fire Entertainment
Publisher: Reverb Triple XP
Platforms: PC
Tested on: PC
Osiris: New Dawn – Preview
Osiris: New Dawn is a big and ambitious new game which the developers at Fenix Fire Entertainment are trying to build. It’s a open world space survival game where you build a colony on a distant planet after crash-landing. You can discover the planet, build your own space base and even play with your friends already in this early access. Let’s see where the game stands today.
Osiris: New Dawn is a new, upcoming open world space survival game that is currently in Steam Early Access. The game is set on a distant planet in the year 2046. You’ve made a crash-landing on this planet and your job is to thrive: build a colony, battle the wildlife and hostile astronauts and explore the planet for immeasurable riches.
After a somewhat modest character creation, where only one of four classes is currently available, you’re all set to go exploring in your universe, after you’ve configured the rules (aliens, attack damage, alien health, resource yield, …). Your first job on the planet is to stabilize your suit, since it has been breached from the crash, and setting up an inflatable dome from a care package that was left over from your ship.
Once that’s done and you have an operational “base”, you can go exploring on your own or you can follow the missions that pop up in the top right. These missions give you simple objectives like “build structure x” or “gather resource y”. This leaves a lot of room for exploration since you’re not told precisely what to do, and your life won’t depend on it whether you do it or not. Of course, there are a lot of hostile aliens around that can creep up to you from any corner, so you’ll either have to face them or run. Speaking of running, aliens seem to chase you infinitely so they’re virtually impossible to get away from…
Luckily you have a handy little robot to help you on your journey. The Osiris Mission Personal Assistant is yours to command. You can tell it to follow you, patrol, mine, defend, repair and more. It’s a nice break to know that something can automatically mine for you, since you need a lot of resources. These resources can be used to build structures, utilities and furniture. These objects can range from simple things like flags or beacons to crazy stuff like barracks, automatic turrets and more.
The world you live in is huge, and there’s an enormous amount of things to explore. Some resources are very rare and could take a very long time to find, but it’s totally worth it for the high-end items you can make from them. There’s quite a bit of different resources. These can be things like human waste, wire, gasses, ores, diamonds and more.
Watch out though, because the environment, other players and aliens aren’t the only thing you have to watch out for. As this is a survival game, you’ll also have to keep track of your temperature, suit pressure, hydration, nutrition, health, suit strength, oxygen and stamina. All of these things combined can make it extremely hard to survive for a long period of time without going to your base once in a while. However, most resources deplete fairly quickly, but there’s probably some balancing to be done here in order to make it harder or easier in the future.
Other than that, there’s not much to remark about the gameplay. Right now it’s pretty good, the resource gains and aliens could use some tweaking even beyond the sliders you can set for your world. The AI for your robot companion is also pretty stupid, sometimes you set it to mine and it just spins around in circles doing nothing. Most of this stuff isn’t game-breaking though and doesn’t change anything about the core functionality of the game, which is pretty solid.
Graphics wise however, the game doesn’t feel that fluent. Whether that is due to poor optimization or just because of the huge world and good graphics will be more clear soon, since it’s still in early access. The recommended system specifications on Steam are pretty high though, so hopefully some optimization can be done in order to make it run better on lower-end systems.
The sound is also pretty solid. Ambient music is present and sounds pretty neat, and sound effects are also quite good. However, it does seem that it storms like 85% of the time in the game, which can get quite annoying since it’s pretty loud.
Conclusion
All in all, Osiris: New Dawn is in pretty good shape for an early access game. The gameplay is intriguing and there’s a lot to do already (not quite as much as in the trailer, but hopefully soon!), while the graphics look pretty good already but low to even mid end computers might suffer from frame drops. Multiplayer is also pretty solid, although there might be some pretty heavy rubberbanding from time to time.
Osiris: New Dawn - Preview,
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