I found her accent to be adorable, so I didn’t want to experiment with the other available options for myself, but maybe the reptilian Kangah or the white-haired Professor Zaine is more your speed - it’s up to you. There are also additional characters to purchase in case you’re not a fan of Quinn Hicks, the default protagonist. You can then spend these on cosmetic upgrades that mostly amount to color-swapped versions of whatever you’re wearing. See, the game gives you credits for completing daily quests and for simply surviving each night. Oh, and there’s also a weirdly implemented cosmetic system that I want to talk about for a bit. This can be a distraction from the true joy of just building and expanding your base while you continue to learn fresh recipes.Īgain, this was certainly not enough to turn me off of the game, but it does seem like there could be some balance changes to reduce the rate at which you starve or run out of oxygen. While I did manage to get my hunger meter under control eventually (by planting massive farms outside my base), there was a point when I was spending most of my time just wandering around looking for food and oxygen. Plus, you’ll have a place to store the extra junk that you’ve been collecting (in case you need it later) and wait out the game’s brutally cold nights.Īctually, that brings me to another one of my gripes about Beyond Contact: I do think the survival mechanics are a little too brutal. You’ve actually claimed a piece of land, and now it’s yours to develop and nurture. Before that point, you can feel a bit lost and purposeless, but when your first base is complete, you suddenly feel connected to Ketern in a way that might surprise you. I feel like the game really starts cooking once you establish a base (which the game sort of nudges you to do early in the story). This happens slowly enough that you’re not overwhelmed with new recipes all the time, but fast enough that you always feel like you’re making progress. As you collect and scan various plants and minerals in the game, you will earn data, which can be spent buying new crafting recipes and building blueprints. The thing that hooked me was the drip-fed crafting mechanic. This game does have a series of quests that tell an over-arcing narrative, but I honestly never felt all that invested in the story. According to Steam, I’ve played this one for about 16 hours so far, and I don’t feel like I’m done with it yet. The character tends to spin just a little too slowly, so when you want to shoot something behind you, you’ll have to allow a little bit of extra time for them to turn all the way around, otherwise you’ll shoot off to the left or the right of where you were intending to.īut neither of those issues is a dealbreaker for a fifteen-dollar video game, and I ended up really enjoying my time with Beyond Contact. I always felt like I wish I could zoom the camera out a little bit further, and I did struggle to aim my weapons with a controller. The camera angle doesn’t change a lot about the basic gameplay loop, though I do think it makes it feel a little more awkward to play than it needs to. It’s almost like a Diablo-like take on No Man’s Sky (though without all of No Man’s Sky‘s planet-hopping - Beyond Contact takes place on a single planet called Ketern). I would probably draw the line somewhere before $25, though.īeyond Contact is one of those survival buildy-crafty games that’s been all the rage since Minecraftand DayZ became such massively successful properties (has it been more than a decade already?) The difference, I suppose, is that this one takes place on an alien world, and that it’s also played from a Diablo-style top-down perspective. In fact, I think Playcorp and Deep Silver could have asked for $20 or even $22.50 for this. But this actually costs a cool $14.99 (and at the time of this writing, it’s on sale for an even cooler $9.89.) For ten or fifteen bucks, Beyond Contact is absolutely worth the asking price. If I would have paid $70 for this - or even like $40 - I think I would have said that it feels a little undercooked but that it’s also showing a lot of promise. I mean, you expect something totally different from a $70 game than you would from a $20 game, right? Sometimes, the price of a game will totally change the way you feel about the content of that game.
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