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| Escape Velocity: Nova, Final Review by Mischief Maker 09/12/2004, 10:10am PDT | ||||
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| I remember one time I took a drink of something I thought was going to be water or rootbeer or something, and it turned out to be neither of those things. It was sour and tart and sickly sweet and carbonated to boot. The flavor was revolting! I spat it out and tore off the cover to see what I drank only to realize I'd taken a sip of simple, harmless sprite.
My reaction to EV:Nova was about the same. I thought it was a shitty Elite clone, but it turned out to be one of the best RPGs I've played in years. The Macintosh gets about one game every five years, so every mac player and professional mac game reviewer is so pants-shittingly in love with this game they couldn't even conceive of saying anything bad about it. Luckily, they ported it to the PC so that I, who believe that all the best games of all time were already made 5 years ago, can give you the skinny. Escape Velocity is basically a shitty 2D elite-clone with sprite based graphics and absolutely no sense of scale (gigantic battlecruisers look barely bigger than my 2-man corvette.) There's very little sense of your velocity. Weapons upgrades are sketchy at best as adding extra weapons will only increase your rate of fire and mixing strong with weak weapons will only cause your ship to oscillate between shooting the good stuff and the crappy stuff. I sincerely hope the sound is public domain and the only music to be found in the game is Jupiter from "The Planets" playing over the opening splash screen. So why play? Because as your ship gets upgraded and your confirmed kill count grows, you start getting approached by dudes randomly in spaceports and bars asking you to get involved in simple missions that burst into whole epic quests. While flatspace has better controls and is more enjoyable in its upgrade-for-the-sake-of-upgrading gameplay, zooming arund and shooting down motherfuckers is considerably more fun in an RPG than selecting "Fight" out of a goddamn popup menu. The game's plot doesn't have any morals or ideas you haven't heard before, but what it steals, it steals from all the right places. All the moral messages about how mind-slavery and xenophobia and irish-baiting are bad are mixed in through fucking EVENTS instead of boring soliloquies delivered by wide-eyed anime waifs. Best of all, this game's plot doesn't shy away from getting seriously epic. I've finished two of the main plots and both ended with me becoming a messiah, taking part in a gigantic orgy of death between fucking huge space fleets, and ending with the human race evolving to a higher form. So far I've been space-moses in the Vell-Os storyline and space-rama in the polaris storyline. I can't wait to become space-buddha in the federation storyline, space-mohammad in the Auroran storyline, space-jesus in the rebel storyline, and space-L. Ron Hubbard in the pirate storyline. The subplots don't get boring either, because they take unexpected twists when you replay them. Last game I became friends with this irish dude, got involved in a gang war, and in the end forged a peace between the two sides and finished by getting shitfaced with him at the bar. This time, I failed to forge peace, my irish drinking-buddy got killed, and now I'm getting involved in a big revenge plot. Final Verdict: As an Elite clone, its shitty controls and lack of scale make it a failure. As an RPG, its non menu-based combat coupled with a grand, yet unpretentious plot (in space with no fantasy crap) make it a winner! Protip: Making money in this game blows. Just shuttle medicine to Tuatha and Luxuries back to Sol with an army of freighters escorting you and you can make all the money you need for that kickass ship in no time. |
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Escape Velocity: Nova, Final Review by 09/12/2004, 10:10am PDT  What the fuck is elite?! NT by 09/12/2004, 11:59am PDT Welcome back by 09/12/2004, 12:00pm PDT Vega Strike is better. by 09/12/2004, 12:11pm PDT Re: Escape Velocity: Nova, Final Review by 09/12/2004, 12:37pm PDT Either he's gay or Zseni WAS right and he is a chick NT by 09/12/2004, 12:48pm PDT Worst metaphor EVAR by 09/12/2004, 1:12pm PDT |
