Space Siege Previews

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Written by BuckGB on January 8th, 2008

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The demonstration showed off the basic premise of the game, which is you'll navigate the interiors of the spaceship, blowing away hundreds of alien opponents in the process. You'll have plenty of weapons at your disposal, as well as skills and abilities. However, the true challenge in Space Siege is figuring out how much you want to turn Walker into less of a human being and more of a cybernetic organism. During the game, you'll be given choices to exchange parts of Walker's organic party for cybernetic parts. These parts may confer powerful bonuses and abilities, but at the price of him becoming less human. The tradeoff is that the characters in the game will react differently to Walker, especially if he becomes less and less human. There are also very powerful abilities that can only be unlocked if Walker retains his humanity. So where will you draw the line? What choices will you make?

One interesting choice has to do with cybernetic enhancements: equipping yourself with machine parts, such as a bionic limb or robot eye, can unlock branches of the skill tree. But the cost is your character's "Humanity" stat. As your character becomes less and less human, NPCs will react to you differently. The main choice of the game isn't good or evil. The principle decision is, "How much of my humanity do I sacrifice to save the world?" It's possible to finish the game as a barely-recognizable cyborg badass. Players seeking a real challenge may try to finish the game as a pure human.

Controlling the action, at least for this demo, utilized WASD keys for camera control and mouse 1 (M1) for movement. Double-clicking M1 made Walker roll, and then there are the number keys to activate skills, which include things like electrical storms. Depending on what kinds of upgrades you give Walker, he'll start to take on the appearance of a cyborg, eventually turning more or less entirely into a robot. This affects what kind of ending you get (there are three), as well as how the game's NPCs, such as your love-interest, interact with you. It goes a little further in determining which kinds of rooms you can enter, as traps are occasionally present. For instance, if you were fully cybernetic you'd have no problem entering a room full of poison gas, but this version of Walker wouldn't be so great at traversing a space full of EMP blasts. We'll have to wait to play more of the game to see exactly how this dynamic works.

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