Drox Operative review

by Dr_Worm on Dec 29th, 2012

You can’t deny it, Rare Gamer is a pretty small community website – I would almost call it my own personal Gilligan’s Island of the internet. To my surprise, on my birthday no less, I received a request to review the recently released Drox Operative from indie developer Soldak Entertainment, which I gladly and humbly accepted. After playing it for a while, I think Drox Operative, and Soldak for that matter, have great potential, but I have some very mixed feelings with this game.

 

Drox Operative blends the action RPG genre with a space-themed RTS. In layman’s terms, it’s sort of like Diablo in space, which is a pretty unique setting for its kind. My favorite aspects of the game come from the Diablo side of things – having a cool little ship you can call your own, cruising the galaxy as a mercenary for whoever happens to trust you, and upgrading your ship however you want it. You’re a member of the Drox guild, and you choose between one of ten different races, each with their own style of ship that concurrently have their own stats. Controls are a bit stiff if you use the mouse, but thankfully you can use WASD, which feels a bit better. You can customize your ship with weapons, armors, technology and crew members that, for the most part, passively effect your ship. It would have been nice to have more variety with combat, especially since all the races don’t play very differently from each other and there aren’t any class-specific weapons.

The RTS side of Drox Operative makes it more than a simple Diablo clone. Rather than having a main, linear campaign, your goal is to take over the galaxy by fulfilling one of five winning conditions, be it joining forces with every race in the galaxy, allying with the only race left in the galaxy, or simply having enough money, among others. No campaign mode means Drox Operative is good for quick plays every now and then, but not having a campaign does little to encourage lengthened involvement.

Each game takes place in a sector of space, of which you can set the size before you play, and each sector consists of a number of solar system areas. It can be fun exploring each solar system, but you won’t find much, and they offer little variation. There’s the occasional planet, but you can’t do anything with it, save for terraform it by order of certain races. That is, unless a race happens to already reside on the planet, at which point it acts as a safe haven for commerce, ship repair, and picking up or turning in quests.

A lot of what you’ll find exploring the solar systems are pretty much counterparts of what you’ll see in action RPGs – jump gates are waypoints, derelict ships are dead adventurers, and hunks of space junk act as chests. One unique thing you’ll find are anomalies, which are like chests… with a twist. Maybe you’ll get a rare item, or some money, maybe you’ll find nothing at all, or maybe you’ll find a wormhole that sends you to a completely different solar system. You never know what you’ll get, and I kind of like that. There are also enemies you come across commonly who are essentially non-racial pirates who will attack any ship they come across.

Around this point of exploring what it has to offer, is where I felt like I hit a wall with Drox Operative; there’s basically no structure whatsoever. There isn’t even a tutorial, but there are tooltips that pop up as you play. If you’re a proponent of having freedom right out the gate, then you may appreciate Drox Operative. In fact, there are a lot of options adjusting the game the way you want it, from sector size, XP and quest pacing, number of races, and even making your character find fewer rare drops and money. I wide range of options are always something I like to see. However, all this freedom didn’t help keep me from feeling like I had seen everything there is to see in the game after about only 20 minutes of play.

Drox Operative, it is what it is, but it’s not a particularly user-friendly game. If you haven’t played an ARPG before, you may not understand right away what all the stats are for, and you’re often given more quests than you know what to do with. It can be a bit overwhelming for new players to try to take in everything at once.

Co-op adds a bit of social interaction to the mix. It’s the same single player experience, but with up to as many friends as you want (or as the host’s computer can handle). It’s not bad, but it doesn’t do much to enhance the experience, especially when you become separated by things such as the aforementioned anomalies. What is bad about multiplayer is its lack of user-friendliness – if you don’t know how to port forward your router, there’s a good chance you won’t be able to play with your friends online. You have to open ports even if you want to access Drox Operative’s master server, which I was never even able to do. Thankfully, there is an option for local play, which more multiplayer games need, PC or otherwise.

As I was playing Drox Operative, I couldn’t help but imagine what it could have been as opposed to what it is. If it had more structure, being a full-fledged ARPG without so many RTS elements, it would have been a fairly unique kind of game. I could imagine going to planets and doing missions on the surface, like Star Fox – that would have been awesome. But, for a game that, from my understanding, was made by just two people, then it’s actually a pretty technically impressive game. Drox Operative is a game that fills a certain niche that hadn’t been occupied, and for that I commend it. Give the demo a shot and see if it hits that sweet spot like it did mine.

3 out of 5

 

You can find more information about Drox Operative from its website here:

http://www.soldak.com/Drox-Operative/Overview.html

Categories: Reviews