Okay, I just played through the Space Siege DEMO already. Yeah; finished it already. Yeah, that was done in a matter of minutes. That was fast; real fast.
This Demo of the game really puts the action in action-RPG. The game's hectic as sin with its action -- and yes, its action absolutely rocks, as you'd probably expect. And, let me say this right now -- it feels more like an action game than an RPG -- of course, you still are in click and point mode here.
A lot of the conventional and traditional things we've known all about RPG's seem to be gone here in this demo. Don't expect manipulating Inventories around, since there really isn't a traditional Inventory here. Don't expect Inventories to overload size, so that you can't move around. Don't expect to be leaving loot behind, b/c you got too much already that you're carrying. Doesn't look like we'll be heading back to towns to sell tons of equipment, either -- we'll probably be selling parts? I dunno; no towns in the demo (but there will be towns in full version).
See, you basically start off w/ basic skills, armor, and weapons -- that's it. You don't really pick up whole pieces of loot, like in many other RPG's. No, instead, when you kill stuff that drops stuff or find stuff around the gameworld, they're usually just be straight-up "upgradable pieces." These pieces, when you get enough of them, when you get to a Workbench and you can upgrade, whatever you feel like -- your armor, weapons, base-stats, skills, etc etc.
Now, you can find other melee weapons and guns in the gameworld, but there don't seem to be a heck a lot of them b/c the few weapons will all be unique -- for example, I've seen a assault rifle and a chaingun. Though, here's where the RPG part comes -- they're both pretty upgradable and have a good amount of different things about them that you can upgrade for each weapon, too.
Also, the story seems well-voice-acted, well-told and well-presented, unlike many of Taylor's past games. There were a few in-game cut-scenes, which were all well-done. Not enough here to tell you if it'll be anything special, which I highly doubt, given GPG's past history of storytelling; but these seems to be done better so far than anything else he's tried.
Unfortunately, it's not the best running game. It looks good, but really at what expense? Everything on HIGH in 1028x768, my PC (P4 at 3.2 Ghz with HT Tech, 512 MB of GF 8800 GT DDR3 RAM, 2 GB RAM, Win XP Home) was in the low 20's -- no thanks. Dropping graphical settings of Textures and Models to Medium, but keeping rest to HIGH helped keep me always above 30 frames per sec. Hopefully, they can tweak the engine a little bit before the full version officially comes out.
Those looking for a click-and-point style action-game with a little bit of RPG elements, might want to take a look at this one.
If you want a RPG with some action elements, you really might want to look elsewhere. This won't be your ticket.
