O.R.B. Review

As time goes by, it seems that the space RTS genre can be divided into two sub-genres the "before Homeworld" genre and the "after Homeworld" genre. So, OK, there are not many of those games altogether, but whenever any of them appears, the influence of the aforementioned Homeworld is more than obvious. This also goes for O.R.B (Off-World Resource Base) a 3D space strategy, published by Strategy First.

We're going in!

Well, we're gonna shoot first and ask questions later.

The plot is basically the same in all space strategies, and can mostly be described as a conflict between two or three fractions, each of which believes that it would be wiser by far to get rid of the remaining fractions before somebody gets rid of them. This storyline develops in ORB through a series of visually appealing, yet somewhat lengthy cut-scenes and the synthesized voice telling that can hardly be understood at times. The game is focused on exploration, resource harvesting, building ships, developing technologies and upgrading in order to beat the enemy. It features two campaigns, a skirmish mode and a multiplayer mode. The two campaigns are pretty much the same with slight visual differences, and most missions have multiple goals. Whenever I think I am done with a mission a new quest pops out. The missions always come down to exploring something or destroying something else, which is not really inventive. They are connected with each other, and the resources you posses at the end of one mission are transferred to the beginning of the next one. One of the frustrating things was that in some missions it takes forever to get to the battle and even though you can speed up time up to three times, that process is still annoyingly slow. The skirmish mode, which is by the way, far more interesting, lets you choose your favorite race and play freely against the computer.

The interface is unobtrusive and will let you quickly and easily access all necessary options through its neatly stylized icons in the lower part of the screen, and the 2D mini-map will rarely ever be used, as the game features an easily accessible full-screen map of the terrain. Your development will directly depend on the number of people under your command, so if you start building a huge fleet right away and deploy all your human resources, you won't last very long. You can increase your human resources only by building new bases so you will have to carefully deploy your human resources according to mission priorities. In order to research something you have to assign at least one person to the task, and the more of them you assign, the faster the process will run. Introducing the human resources in this way was a really nice move. But to spoil things, you are going to face many huge maps with scarce resources. While you scan all the asteroids for resources, build resource bases, mine the resources and hull them home, the enemy will have sufficient time to annihilate you. The only positive thing about this is that it will keep you from getting into a resource gathering frenzy and make you focus more clearly on the mission before you. There are several categories of spaceships: fighters, logistic, capital ships etc. and each type can be upgraded at least five to six times. You can also set unit behavior and their default response to some situations.

If there is one good thing about these space strategies it is the fact that you can use full 3D. Still, good doesn't always mean practical... and especially not here; moving through all three dimensions through areas that span several light-years whilst leading your army against a pretty zealous enemy is a particularly tricky task. This is why you will frequently go back to the fairly ugly 2D map to find your way around space. I basically used the 2D map for grouping units and issuing orders, and then switched back to the 3D view to enjoy the sights. A piece of cake.

Great shot! That was one in a million.

Who's the quickest pilot around here?

The enemy AI is quite good and may give you some trouble, but your units will, on the other hand, occasionally act in a completely ridiculous way. When I send them to attack something they will blindly pursue their goal regardless of weather someone attacks them in the meantime. This can be rectified by constantly watching them and changing their targets as appropriate, but this can also be rather difficult in greater battles, so what I mostly did was send one group to attack, and another to cover them. This worked just fine.

The 3D graphics are beautiful (though Hegemonia did look better), the ship models are well designed and detailed, the planets and surroundings are vivid and help you imagine you are really in outer space. The explosions are visually most attractive and feature lovely particle effects. The way ships move looks good only if you don't zoom in too much. I basically love the idea of having a free camera, but it is also easy to get lost with it.

Another nice but not pariculary handy feature is the ability to zoom out way too much, until you only see some colored particles in the distance... fortunately, the focus button will swiftly take you back to some plausible level of zoom. If you play the game in a higher resolution the frame-rate will probably drop when there's a lot of action on screen, and explosions can even bring it down to just a couple of frames. Naturally, this all depends on your hardware configuration, but let's just say this happened a lot on my mid-level PC.

The relaxing ambient soundtrack will dynamically change as soon as the enemy units approach. The sound effects are decent, but nothing special, and your crew members will reply to your commands by grumbling some incomprehensible gibberish; then again, why would anyone care to know what they think?

For those of you who like fighting human opponents, the game supports the multiplayer mode over LAN and internet. The multiplayer can be fun, but the aforementioned hardware requirements, may hinder the gameplay when the screen get littered with opponents.

What am I to conclude? All modern space-based strategies have this problem that they were all made after Homeworld, and that they all strive to be Homeworld. There are precious little true innovations in O.R.B.. This is altogether an interesting game, in spite of the cliché story and occasionally slow-paced missions. The nice graphics, appealing skirmish missions and the huge number of possible upgrades could satisfy less demanding players for some time. Are you one of them?