Posted in: Games, Review, Video Games | Tagged: game review, Rocwise Entertainment, Soldiers of the Universe, Steam

Soldiers of the Universe is Too Unfinished to be Out of Early Access

Published Sat, 03 Feb 2018 10:45:37 -0600

Soldiers of the Universe just might be the worst game I've ever played. I honestly cannot think of a game that has failed to impress me on so many levels. It's a first person shooter released out of Steam Early Access to a full launch and if you check the reviews, most of the recent ones have been incredibly negative and I'm only going to add to that pile. The game's premise makes little sense. You start out in the White House, on a phone call with your father. What you're doing in Washington DC is never explained. You then go to your father's funeral and get involved with what is essentially a supersoldier program based in Turkey. Each member of the program is there based on an inherited title from father to son. Your father was a member of the program, which means you are now a member of the program. You sit through a pretty opaque board meeting which gives you very little information other than the names and roles of your fellow Soldiers of the Universe.

Then you're shipped out to do some fighting for reasons that were so vague I didn't know them even while watching the cutscene. That drops you into some basic FPS combat, but really, the FPS combat is pretty goddamn terrible. Even on keyboard and mouse, aiming is a nightmare. Your enemies can hit you from much further than you can hit them. There is no easy way to track them or to work with your AI teammates.

You don't have any sophisticated options for using cover. You can't crouch down particularly low, and your gun's scope isn't much better than a magnifying glass. You can cycle through a couple other preloaded weapons including an assault rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol. None of which give you anything even slightly useful. And hey, when you're shot, your scope shifts around like crazy. Which is pretty accurate, I'm almost certain no real person takes a gunshot and keeps their aim perfectly on-target, but this is a video game. We expect a lot of things to not match up to reality to make playing a bit easier and more streamlined.

There is also no tutorial to speak of, so weapon switching, using your sights, and managing to crouch behind cover is left to your intuition as a rain of bullets pelt you from enemies you can't see because everything looks the same in this game. And that damage, well, it is seemingly random. Sometimes a single bullet will kill you, other times it does no damage, and occasionally you'll live despite having an empty health bar. Oh right, finding that health bar is also not something that you figure out immediately.

It honestly took me about five deaths to figure out what part of the UI was tracking my health and what was tracking my bullets.

Sometimes, while running around corridors that look the same while chasing after nonsense objectives, you'll be hit by bullets coming from random directions, because the enemies will still fire at you despite being outside of draw distance. So they can always see you, but you can't always see them. Fantastic.

And in case you wanted to be tactical about your shooting instead of just running down hallways waiting to get shot, well, there's no real way to have any kind of tactical advantage over the enemy AI. It doesn't help that there are random invisible walls that your enemies can shoot through, but you can't move around.

Oh and the difficulty scaling doesn't seem to do a damn thing.

So not only is the combat terrible, the character designs and overall graphics look like they could run off of Windows 95, and the voice acting is non-existant. I would rather have Siri read every line of dialogue in the game than put up with the lackluster voice acting for even another minute.

We watch the main character cry over his father's grave with a blase yell and some really pathetic weeping. Mass Effect: Andromeda has better facial animations, mostly because it has facial animations. I'm not certain a single character in Soldiers of the Universe is capable of an emotion other than stoic blankface.

And that's not even getting into the Halo-esque battle suit.

Yes, a modern warfare FPS designed by a small studio is always going to be a risky venture. The AAA competition is steep and has been in the game so long it knows what not to do. But that doesn't excuse Soldiers of the Universe for having a nonsense bombastic name, almost nonexistent but somehow still jingoistic nationalism disguised as a plot, and ridiculous inconsistencies in the graphics, AI, and damage output.

I will give Soldiers of the Universe one thing. It looks really great in still screenshots. I just wish the rest of the game looked that way. Some small bits of it do, but the majority of the graphics look so outdated they make me laugh.

In fact, between the inconsistent graphics, terrible voice acting, terrible AI, legion of bugs, dislike of physics, and lack of any kind of mechanics Soldiers of the Universe shouldn't be out of Early Access at all. In fact, I'm not even sure the game should be in Early Access either. It's so unfinished it feels like the developers gave up about a quarter of the way through development.

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