OUR RATING 5/10
GAME OVERVIEW
Third person sci-fi alien space shooter begins with the destruction of your world and humanity’s elite space trooper taking down aliens and escaping just before its obliteration.
Your character is a guy that can be reborn to go and fight the enemy that’s coming.
GAMEPLAY
The game doesn’t actually tell you where you need to go. The world around you, depending on where you need to go, is destructible which is nice. You can destroy the world in order to open up areas of where you need to go.
The enemies don’t appear to have hit bars or health bars. It is important to note that you can have a 3D heads up display or you can have it like a 2D.
You’ve got different weapons you can choose from. It starts you off with a revolver and a pulse gun which destroys everything in its sight. The running movement’s a bit odd and aiming doesn’t really do a huge amount. You don’t zoom in a lot and there’s this weird shaking with the gun which is not ideal.
PROs, CONs and OVERALL GAMING EXPERIENCE
There are a lot of things going wrong in Orange Cast and the story seems like a pretty good place to start. Inspired by a series of books known as The Expanse, the game attempts to build a massive sci-fi space opera that’s clearly held together by sticks and scotch tape.
Everything about Orange Cast is a grand idea executed with minimal resources and shoddy development and the story is no different. For starters, the english translations are borderline incomprehensible to the point where it’s really difficult to understand what the story is. The second major problem is that none of the dialogue is spoken. You have to read it all. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue but a huge portion of it comes to you during firefights, so it’ll go largely unread.
The nail in the coffin for the story is that it’s really just not that engaging. Even after intently reading the dialogue and finding extra codex entries, we have yet to find anything unique about the story that will make players want to hear more. The world that’s been built has so much potential. There are well detailed planets to explore. Little towns to shop around in and the beauty of space on your doorstep. But it’s all undercut by constant bugs and the cold empty linearity that feels more like an early access than a full release game.
Even just trying to make your way through the world results in groans and eye rolls as your character’s awkwardly animated run gets caught on every bush and root on the ground. The gameplay combat tries to be a mix between dead space and doom. Kinda creepy and kinda bloody. However, it’s never really tense enough to live up to the former and never smooth enough for the latter.
The persistent movement issues are always just the forefront of gameplay. Not only getting caught on imperceptible snags but also trying to run from point a to point b, or pull out your weapon and aim down your sights seems to only register occasionally.
For some reason when you place your camera over your left shoulder, it puts your character model almost in the middle of the screen blocking your view. There’s no setting to turn off screen shake which means that if you are prone to motion sickness, you will get very nauseous very quickly.
You have several different special abilities you can activate with your cue but not only did this not work at all but attempting to rebind the keys caused the game to crash every single time.
Neither of these bugs existed during the game’s prologue.
The biggest bug of all, if you die you literally just respawn at the last place you saved at with a hundred percent health and refilled ammo. This is a problem because you can quick save at any time even in the middle of a fight. So if you’re about to die or if you’re out of ammo just save because you’ll just reload that exact spot with plenty of bullets and health to continue the fight.
It’s really, really unfortunate that this is where they landed. What it all boils down to is too much game and not enough development with constant frame rate dips and audio bugs to show for it, making this really feel much more like a day one early access than a day one of a full release with its excessive bugs, uninspired combat and incoherent storytelling.
You can pick up Orange Cast on Steam. It definitely had the potential to be an insane mixture of Mass Effect and Doom. It will all feel nostalgic when you get to the first town and see a glimpse of what Orange Cast was supposed to be.
Respawn Island 