Eterium – Review (PC)

Eterium – Review (PC)

Eterium is a heck of a throwback to the old space flight sim games, in all of the right – and wrong – ways.

The first time I exploded in the depths of space was because I couldn’t figure out how to roll my ship to the left. I could roll right, sure, I was a pro at rolling right, but left? Entirely beyond my abilities. My craft crumpled like a coke can under a boot at full speed against an asteroid, which could only have been dodged by rolling. Specifically, to the left.

The second time was ever so slightly less embarrassing. At least, it was because something was trying to blow me up, and not because I am an idiot and don’t know how to fly. No, this time, it was because I was an idiot and couldn’t find the tilde key on my keyboard which was inex-fucking-plicably the button that stops missiles from smearing all of the blood in your face across the surface of the nearest moon. Could I go into the menu and rebind the key to something that isn’t shift + hash sign at the same time? Could I fuck. Eterium is the kind of game where all of the options are in the launcher and what you can do in-game is limited to cranking up or switching off the tasty space jams you’re listening to. Six missiles hit my ship, Ryan explodes, Ryan has to go and do something else for a bit to calm down.

I returned with a little bit more focus, and actually made sure I knew where all the buttons required to play the game where on my keyboard before trying to play it. You will mostly likely have to do this yourself, too; Eterium has roughly nothing in the way of a tutorial outside of telling you to press a specific button every now and then and letting you watch what happens when you do it.

hallway

I feel like this is probably because Eterium‘s tutorial came out well over two decades ago and is actually called Wing Commander. There’s very little here that’s welcoming for someone who isn’t intensely familiar with the space flight sim genre and to be fair, it makes no excuses for itself. On one hand, it’s refreshing to find a game that’s so unapologetically grounded in a bygone aspect of PC gaming.  On the other, it makes no real effort to go beyond what games like Wing Commander, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron and Descent: Freespace achieved to such great success. It’s said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so developers Rogue Earth must be pretty fucking sincere, but flat-out imitation is no way to make a game. There’s no evolution here.

For those of you unfamiliar with the genre, Eterium has you piloting a space ship from a first-person view, with all of the information you would normally get from a videogame HUD being displayed on apparatus inside the cockpit of your ship. It’s a genre that’s garnered an extremely dedicated following among those that like their space games to be in-depth, immersive, and intense, but it hasn’t seen a lot of love in recent years.

boom

So perhaps it’s not a bad thing that Eterium doesn’t deviate from the established norm. That’s the issue I’m having here with trying to review it. Chances are that, if you’re the kind of person that still has a modded copy of Wing Commander 2 that you still play with a joystick then you’re going to love Eterium, because it’s nothing different. You shoot bad guys with lasers and meson cannons and missiles from varying ships which vary in terms of their speed, defenses and weaponry, and have to manage a variety of different sub-weapons and defensive counter measures.

The difficulty actually scales with your performance and the game is a serious challenge, so there’s always a sense of fighting against the odds. There’s a lot to be said for the feeling of finally shaking off that fighter with the well-timed deployment of a decoy and blasting your afterburners into full force to line up the perfect shot on the guy your wingman can’t get away from.   The combat is definitely the focus of the game which is very fortunate, because the rest of it doesn’t hold up well. When I mentioned that the game was just a series of fights I meant it in the most sincere way; if you’re not in combat, the game constantly presses you to hit the auto-pilot button so that you can get to a fight. If it doesn’t take you to a fight, it just tells you to hit it again, until you either get into a scrap, or you get to the end of a mission.

When you’re not on a mission, you’ll spend time on board a carrier or station, checking out ships, playing simulation missions for training, talk to your various co-pilots, or… well, that’s it. It’s about as thoroughly uninteresting as it sounds. There’s a handful of unique conversations after every mission, but none of the tertiary characters are remotely interesting beyond the clichés they spout and represent. Nor is there any voice acting to spice up the dull conversations you have with static pictures of budget-rate anime rejects. In the case of narrative elements it’s actually significantly worse than the game it’s trying to recreate – Wing Commander‘s FMV sequences falling into legend as being good in a hilariously bad kind of way – which begs the question; why?

GODWHATISTHAT

These games popping up lately, in the vein of the succesful Kickstarter projects like Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenara aim to bring back games in styles and genres long since abandoned by publishers. The Wing Commander style of space combat sims is definitely worthy of resurrection but as a gameplay-focused experience that doesn’t deviate from the old, I can’t give Eterium a recommendation to anyone bar the most extreme fans of the genre who just really need something new.

With Star Citizen looming ominously on the horizon, Eterium might not even be necessary to scratch the itchiest of itches.   Eterium is, in fairness, an indie game with a very small team behind it, and at the very least, to be commended for championing an exceptionally-niche hardcore genre. If Rogue Earth do find themselves making another game in the same vein, there’s a lot to learn about what not to do to be gained from Eterium. 

The Good

  • Competent moment-to-moment space-based action.
  • The soundtrack is pretty solid in some places.

The Bad

  • It’s a one trick pony, and this pony’s trick has been done before in more interesting ways.
  • Manga-esque character portraits that detract from the experience more than they add.
  • The game pretty much requires you to have a working knowledge of the genre before you can play it.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.
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