Osiris: New Dawn, another game in the slew of Survival crafting genre, fist-bumping similar games like Ark: Survival Evolved or rust. However, Osiris is new and as such is very underdeveloped, just like those two games were when they first released. Crash landing on an unforgiving planet you must repair your suit, set up a camp with the end goal of making vehicles to traverse the planet or one day leave it.
Story
Like many other Sci-fi survival games, you start off stranded on a remote planet, with your suit being damaged and in need of repairs. Thankfully you have duct tape and patch up those holes, but the game then starts to give you more and more missions, to gather resources and build yourself a little base to live in. Although the missions do not take you far, going up to a Habitat and leaving you to your own devices after that.
The main goal right now is to build a base with all the facilities you need to “live happily” on this desert planet, making food and gathering materials to build even more. After making a base you can then move onto creating vehicles to move about the planet faster and transport more materials from nodes to your base. Finally, making a spaceship to leave the planet… which is a bit pointless as there isn’t much space activity or other planets thus far.
You can play the game alone in single player or with up to 11 other players in multiplayer servers. While the choice is nice to have, the servers are very underdeveloped right now, with a maximum of 40 structures per server, a maximum of 12 players per server and the amount of lag that all those things produce. However the game seems to be designed in a way to incentivise working together, mainly the amount of materials needed to craft things and the structure limit.
Gameplay
Osiris doesn’t throw many curveballs with its control scheme or mechanics, WASD to move, space to jump and use your jet boots, left click to use your tool, E/F to interact with objects. Besides normal movement you can also place down structures, with a preview of what they will look like, rotating them with the mouse clicks and setting it down with F. You can also access your inventory with the Tab button, moving your inventory around, checking and levelling up your stats and accessing crafting.
The game is very slow, and I mean very slow, when it comes to the crafting, having to hold down the crafting button, crafting the walls, panels and windows in the buildings themselves and that’s after hours of grinding resources that are scattered around the map. It took me 5 trips with 8 barrels to get enough Hydrogen to make enough plastic to make a barracks, and if you’re not close to the node the trip will be agonising.
Besides crafting and building, you can also harvest the local alien wildlife, shooting them with pistols and assault rifles or using your hammer to knock some sense into them. Once dead these creatures will drop some alien meat which can be cooked for a good source of food later on. When night arrives on the planet it becomes pitch black, save for the stars in the sky and the lights of your base. Along with the darkness comes the danger as zombielike aliens will attack your base, in huge numbers if the random generation is not kind on you.
Overall thoughts and feelings
Osiris is in early access so we can expect a lot of glitches, problems and balancing to be made to the game and its systems. As of right now, I believe the player and structure limits are way too low and the lag caused by even the smallest amount of these things really diminishes the ability to play online. The droid you start with has some terrible path tracking and is very underpowered, unless you keep him on flat ground with a clear route to materials he might end up just getting lost somewhere. There isn’t enough music and some sounds have not been implemented or merely do not play. The space between minerals is very annoying when you need to make several trips to build just 1 building, but thankfully they have set spawn points so trips aren’t confusing once you’ve learned the positions.
Osiris right now is too early in development to be given a recommendation from me, technical issues and a lack of enjoyment will lead to a lot of frustration. However that is not to say that the game doesn’t have potential, I can see this being a viable alternative to ARK if you’re wanting a sci-fi version of that game with space travel… when it gets implemented. There is only 1 class, with only 1 faction seemingly implemented with exp, levelling is vastly too slow with not much of a reward and most of the vehicles kind of lack purpose when 1 can do most of what you need. The feeling of crafting and building is great when you finally finish, but with no resources returned on destruction, it is very unforgiving if you misplace something or want to move objects around.
You must be logged in to post a comment.