Posted on: January 15, 2013
wvpr
Games: Reviews: 47
generic but not bad
It's been a while since I played this, and I didn't get all the way through the campaign. But I remember enough to comment here. ORB is essentially a Homeworld clone, but with more focus on resource gathering and territory control. In campaign missions, you tend to leapfrog from one asteroid to another, setting up mining networks and defenses before you push farther. Like Homeworld, ORB places caps on how many of each ship class you can build, and they are pretty low for the portion of the game I finished. A lot of your attention goes to squad formations and careful targeting of closely matched enemy groups. The game engine looks good, the interface does a reasonable job of offering advanced options while keeping everything manageable, and the gameplay is decent if you like this sort of game. The biggest strike against the game is how generic everything feels. Most of the ship designs are uninspired and look very similar to each other. Despite wildly different backstories and visual themes, the two faction fleets play nearly identically, with only a couple of specialist ships keeping them from being exact clones of each other. There is a good-sized storyline tying all the missions together, but there's nothing memorable about it either. It feels like the main reason the game exists is to offer an alternative to Homeworld. But it's not bad at doing that. Worth a look if you've finished Homeworld and Nexus and want another tactical space game along those lines.
Is this helpful to you?
