Topic: Miner Wars 2081 first impressions/review

[D2Disciple]

So, this is, erm, a few years late. As many of you were, I was cautiously optimistic about Miner Wars 2081 when Keen Software House first announced it. To their credit, they gave the Descent community first crack at alpha- and beta-testing when they opened a huge D3 tournament for us (which was probably more fun than the finished product - more on that later). Problem is - I didn't have a computer that would run the game. I do now, so I picked up the (semi?) finished product on Steam during the summer sale for a whole four bucks to find out what I've been missing all this time.

To be fair, I'm genuinely pleased to see that Miner Wars 2081 saw a release at all, let alone one with a fully operable - and quite lengthy! - single-player campaign. If any of you have kept up, Keen has since released the early access to Space Engineers to very positive user reviews and almost 1.5 million sales, which is, in essence, the sandbox space MMO we were always promised with Miner Wars. Despite the many broken promises and the fact that the vision behind Miner Wars was just too darn ambitious to be feasible, color me impressed that Miner Wars managed to come out as robustly as it has from a start-up independent developer.

None of this, however, makes Miner Wars 2081 a very good game.

I'll start with my first impressions, and as I slog my way through this game, I'll review the game a bit more in-depth for those of you that might have been on the fence for the past, oh, six or seven years. 

***FIRST IMPRESSIONS***

One reason I haven't played this game until now is the fact that, at the time of its release, it took a monster of a computer to run. Even now, having just built a computer that roughly doubles the "recommended" system requirements, Miner Wars can't quite hit 60FPS at High detail settings at 1366x768 resoultion (though it certainly looks no less than great on these settings). Keep in mind - if you're not rocking a mid-range card from the last two years or a high end card from four or five years ago, you're going to have a slideshow instead of a playable game.

With all that out of the way, I'm pleased to say that the game installed and ran on my computer with absolutely no issues, and so far the only technical hitch I've run into is a few pieces of debris clipping through the walls (I think I can live with that). That said, reports are this game is very crash-happy and graphical glitches are frequent for many users, so keep that in mind if you plan on giving this game a shot.

Controls

Miner Wars 2081 defaults to keyboard-mouse controls. I tried to use my Saitek Cyborg 3D flight stick that sees a lot of use in Descent for maximum ownage, but I hate to say that I couldn't get it set-up to work well at all. Deadzone and axis acceleration have a very strange lag to them, which makes aiming nearly impossible. Oh well. Keyboard-mouse users, I think you'll be mostly pleased with the control scheme, as it does feel pretty natural. This is, after all, a space FPS, and it feels just right for the application. I am, however, sad to see that triple-chording is simply not possible, as the game will only register forward/back motion with either up/down slide motion or left/right slide motion at one time, instead of all three simultaneously. I guess it's a 5.5DOF game, then? 

Still, it controls well enough, let's move on.

Graphics

In a word, beautiful. Everything is very reflective and shiny, which gives everything a cartoonish vibe that works really, really well. Explosions look great and the solar flares that occasionally rip through space are as marvelous to watch as they are dangerous to fly through. This is quite possibly one of the best-looking independent games I've ever seen, and I'm also happy to say that the realistic, high-poly models, combined with the highly-reflective nature of the lighting and particle effects give it a distinct art direction that will surely make the engine age gracefully.

Story

Not that you care, but there's a lot of it. I like how, rather than simply employing a human vs. alien plotline, the game starts with some fairly savvy political implications - Europe and America forge an alliance to start a research project hoping to harness the energy of the sun and end up blowing the whole darn thing up, destroying the planets and effectively turning the entire solar system into an asteroid field. Only a relative few already travelling in space survive, China seeks to lay all the blame on the Europe-America alliance, and other countries like Russia start to enter the picture after the first level. Tl;dr: blowing up the sun and killing several billion people left on the one life-sustaining planet in your system doesn't make you many friends.

There's a ton of dialog between characters during different missions. It's all delivered... okay, but no one's going to be winning Oscars for the voice acting. More importantly is the fact that you probably just won't care. My armor's low and my oxygen is leaking and I could use a few more missiles and there are a few turrets I'd like to shut down by hacking into the generator but I've got three fighters headed my way and please shut up because I couldn't care less about the story at hand.

Gameplay

Here's where Miner Wars really starts to break down. Let's start off with the most common complaint - the AI. For a developer that's actually currently investing millions of his own dollars into actual scientific AI research (for industrial, technological, and engineering purposes), Rosa and his team surely didn't put a whole lot of effort in Miner Wars. Seriously - fighters fly in, point straight at you, stop, and fire. And they don't move. At all. It's jarring, it's weird, and it makes firefights horrendously boring. In more wide-open environments, "dogfighting" usually becomes a matter of finding some cover, aiming at your target, popping out, and taking enemies out one by one. In enclosed spaces, it's usually a matter of firing a missile or two at a group of three fighters that are literally on top of one another, although things get complicated when a wingman decides to get between you and your targets or, worse, when you get between them and your targets. Yes, your wingmen suffer from the same artificial stupidity and will chaingun-and-rocket you with absolute impunity if you get in their way.

Unfortunately, most of the weapons in this game are very high velocity, which means that once an enemy draws a bead on you, they'll unleash a torrent of weapons fire that will quickly chew through your armor. It's like a Descent mission where the only enemies are Class 1 drillers. The fighters are annoying; the turrets are downright deadly, with a lot more armor and more destructive power. Dodging is almost useless anyway, because all the ships and turrets in this game are absolutely tiny, which makes aiming while sliding and rolling around nearly impossible. Progress becomes a matter of scoping out a landscape first and then figuring out the best plan of attack.

Which unfortunately usually results in a mad bum-rush for your objective. Why? Because this game has way too many different resources (and way too little of each one). Ammo? You'll keep very little of it with you, and refills will be really, really far apart. Waste too much time flying around and you'll run out of fuel. If your armor gets pierced, you'll begin to leak oxygen and, even if you find a repair kit, you could suffocate and die anyway. Money can be used to purchase repair kits and kits, but that requires that you mine ore to sell, which takes entirely too much time for all the reasons listed above. Credit where it's due - I think it's really cool that Keen included all these things, but I find it frustrating that you're almost always low on fuel or low on oxygen or low on armor or low on ammo or low on money. It makes death frequent and progress extremely difficult.

Which is my final complaint. HOLY CRAP is this game hard. Fighters and turrets are everywhere and in large numbers, and honestly, killing them usually becomes luck-based depending on whether they're targeting you or your wingmen. You can stop and poke your head around corners and launch rockets and destroy things one by one, but depleting resources and lack of ammo means you'll be running out of something way before your next checkpoint if you try this method. Want to rush on to the next objective? Good luck, as said fighters and turrets will all just draw a bead on you and pick you to shreds. Every new room or objective requires a very specific strategy combined with a ton of luck. This is just on medium difficulty I'd really hate to see what Hard is like. In fact, I'm considering going back to Easy just to make this game doable.

... But, and a very big but here, at times, it still freaking works. Despite the terrible AI, and the terrible difficulty, and the terrible lack of necessary resources, it's the joy of movement in this game that, like Descent before it, makes it still kinda fun. It even looks good doing it. With thirty-one missions, I'm sure I'll find something more to like here, too, and on a very basic level, it's not dissimilar from Descent 3's singleplayer. I think, had I stuck it out and spent tons of money to keep my computer top-of-the-line from the alpha until now, I'd be very disappointed (as many Miner Wars customers are - I see a lot of comments from Miner Wars backers who refuse to buy Space Engineers based on the disappointment of this game alone). But for four bucks, I think I'm going to have some fun with it. It's not the horribly broken, unfinished mess I expected it to be, it's just a decently solid game hamstrung by it's overly optimistic early development goals. It's just going to be a matter of getting used to managing all of those half-finished concepts and getting past the unbelievably poor AI to get to the meat of what looks like a pretty decent game. Here's hoping it gets better. 

[Kaiaatzl]

I didn't have so much trouble with the combat on medium when I went through the game.  I won't be playing it again any time soon but honestly I liked it more than I liked a lot of games.  It would have really needed a custom mission editor to shine though, so that people could design maps that worked better with the game's mechanics than the ones the game had.
I did think the game's real weakness was the map design not taking advantage of the way the AI works (or doesn't).  Retrovirus was better, but also about ten times harder.

[D2Disciple]

I've purchased both on Steam from their summer sale... I'm honestly looking forward to Retrovirus more, but I thought I'd give my take on MW2081 first.

I literally found a place in mission two where I kept dying over and over and over again to a bunch of turrets, and, deciding this was getting frustrating, I went back and started over in Easy mode... And, as suspected, it's a pushover.

Maybe my perception of MW will change the more I get into the game, but as for all the complaints that Keen released it "completely unfinished" or "while it was still early access" baffles me. Yeah, it's poorly optimized, has a few holdover bad design choices, and has a terrible AI, but it's far from unfinished. A fifteen-to-twenty hour campaign is by all accounts a lengthy action title.

[Kaiaatzl]

I had a lot of fun with it honestly.
You know you can disable the turrets by killing their power source from outside the base, right?
There should have been a line of dialogue explaining that.

[Scyphi]

It would have really needed a custom mission editor to shine though, so that people could design maps that worked better with the game's mechanics than the ones the game had.

I thought a custom editor was one of the things they were going to include with Miner Wars...did that just not happen, or am I totally remembering wrong? (it HAS been awhile...)

I always meant to at least download and play the demo for Miner Wars myself, but never got around to it. I sort just lost interest in it after awhile...didn't have enough to offer to grab my attention. And what I've heard about it since then hasn't helped.

[D2Disciple]

There is one included, but I'm honestly unsure that anyone has ever actually gotten it to work... 

Also, Scyphi, if you have to get one game, get Retrovirus. Its campaign is every bit as good as any of Descent's.

[Kaiaatzl]

Miner Wars's editor works but there's no real point to it.  You can't build a mission with objectives to complete and I can't find a way to play any constructed sectors in multiplayer either.

Retrovirus's editor is beautiful but I can't get any of my maps to load in-game, they just crash.  And the devs weren't very much help.

[-<WillyP>-]

Thanks for the review! I was wondering also about Retrovirus, I might get that next time work slows down .

[D2Disciple]

I've put in about 4 hours into Retrovirus, and I can't put it down. I'll put up a more detailed review of that one later here on this thread as well... It's a bit slower than Descent, but no less exciting.

[Foil]

I loved Retrovirus.  Highly recommended, even though the campaign is somewhat short.

Won't touch Miner Wars, on principle (not after the way they repeatedly broke promises and demonstrably lied to Descent fans early in their marketing).

[D2Disciple]

Yeah, Keen pretty much lied to the Descent community about Miner Wars in so many ways. That said, I can't say I held up my end of the bargain either, as I never actually alpha-tested the game since... Well, I couldn't run the game. Also, when Keen promised some kind of MMO-6DOF-FPS-RPG space sim, I knew that the final product would be cut back significantly. All I really hoped for was the presence of a single-player campaign, so they pretty much delivered the only thing I actually cared about.

Walking a mile in their shoes, I have to say that had Miner Wars tried to actually deliver all it promised, it would have been stuck in development hell until funding ran out and Keen caved. I feel like Space Engineers has a much clearer picture of what it wants to be (6DOF Minecraft, anyone?) than Miner Wars ever did, which is why early backers are so much more satisfied with that product. I'll just chalk it up to a team promising more than it could deliver and biting off more than it could chew before realizing that first and foremost, they actually had to make a game, not just an impressive library of conceptual tech demos.

I really think it would go a long way if Keen offered the disgruntled Descent community, especially the early testers, a free entry to the Space Engineers early access, since in many ways it's the Miner Wars MMO that was originally promised. Doubt they will, though - they burned such a small community that likely 1.4 of of the 1.5 mil backers will not even know Miner Wars ever existed. Still, I think the Descent community experienced the same kind of corporate back-tracking, side-stepping, and development rushing that many employees sadly endure daily under the likes of EA- or Ubisoft- or Nintendo-owned studios. I feel like if I boycotted Keen, I'd have to boycott every other game company on the earth. Besides, it seems Miner Wars was a mistake they're rectifying with Space Engineers, so I hope the best for them.

[Kaiaatzl]

Even though the frontline developer program didn't pan out, I ended up getting enough experience from it to get some actual jobs in that field almost right away.  So from my point of view what they promised wasn't a total failure because that's what I had been hoping to get from it, and I did.
Having ulterior motives is pretty awesome. 

[Matthew]

I loved Retrovirus.  Highly recommended, even though the campaign is somewhat short.

Won't touch Miner Wars, on principle (not after the way they repeatedly broke promises and demonstrably lied to Descent fans early in their marketing).

Agreed. I bought Miner Wars and Space Engineers unfortunately, but I won't be buying anything else. Keen has repeatedly demonstrated an aptitude for overpromising and underachieving, and moving on to another project once they feel it will deliver more money.

[Infamus]

YES. Retrovirus was my sht for a while there. I love it a lot, and that soundtrack, ohhhhhh man that soundtrack. Peros has it on his Bandcamp, if anyone is intrested. I actually wrote a pretty comprehensive review of it, since it got a lot of flak for being "too slow." I mean, yeah it was, but it wasn't that bad, plus even D1 and D2 were kinda slow until you got into multiplayer and started triple-chording like a pro. The only thing that really bugged me was the AI, which made even the bosses easy on the hardest difficulty. Two other irks were the Launch damaging you only if your missile hits an enemy and the Conductor's weapon while infected, but otherwise being defenseless while not.

One thing I LOVED was the neat little detail that the only thing you could kill the Hydra BIOS boss with was the Interrupt shotgun, like how IRQ malfunctions can ruin your machine in more ways than one. I think Dual Strike may have worked, but Interrupt already did tons of damage, especially with the right subroutines. Overall the game was really great and provided a balance between immersion and oldschool shooter gameplay (the backstory is hidden in emails strewn across the system), while also having non-interrupting dialogue and ZERO cutscenes, besides the intro and outro.
There's also a reference to Blade Runner: After defending Oracle later in the game, stick around for a minute.


As far as Miner Wars is concerned... ehhhhh. Wayyy to much overdraw, terrible AI, and underused weapon systems. The ships were also pretty badly designed as far as gameplay goes, mostly consisting of one light and heavy fighter for each faction, where the heavy ones were obviously far superior, it used too much scripting, especially for the capships, and the AI core fight was ridiculously hard. The "glide" bit was nice, but even FSOpen has that, and FS2's physics engine was designed by a dude with a PhD in physics! Can't hardly beat that. I did like where the story was doing, and it was a nicely long game, but it leaves you at a terrible cliffhanger. At least it pulls a Freelancer at the end of it, instead of leaving you high and dry. I also did like most of the non-weapon equipment.

Thankfully I bought it while it was in super-early alpha and only cost me 7 bucks or so.

However, I have no comment on Keen House as a company.