The first game I am reviewing from my Steam bargain list is The Solus Project. Despite what I said in my Steam sale post about not wanting to burn through the games quick in a rush to review them, I've spent 3 hours on The Solus Project and I'm not going to play it any more. The reason for this is a game breaking bug which has no place being in any commercial release. Skip to the section titled "The Game Breaker" if you want to jump straight to finding out what it is, but I strongly recommend steering clear of this game until you see this bug is fixed (which based on an Internet search demonstrating this problem going back over a year, is unlikely to be any time soon).
The Premise
The background for The Solus Project is that Earth has been destroyed by a wandering rogue star. Scientists saw it coming a couple of decades ahead of the actual event and so life vessels were built and a fraction of the population managed to escape to regroup near Pluto. Exploratory vessels have been sent into deep space in order to find new planet to colonise.
However, after years of travel disaster strikes (of course). As you are approaching your destination planet, your ship is destroyed and you manage to escape and crash land in a life pod. This is where the game starts, you have to learn how to survive and try to contact your people to let them know what happened.
If the crash land and survive premise sounds a bit familiar, this is because it's basically the same as Subnautica. Different world and different type of game (diving underwater vs on land) but yeah, it seems this is a bit of a cliché. The VR market is full of them!
Playing the Game.
The game babysits you through the first hour to form a tutorial on how to play. First steps sound very textbook. Find shelter, food and water, make fire for heat and light.
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| The weather is one of the highlights of the game world - extremely threatening |
Shelter is very important in this game because the planet does have extreme weather. Rains come in with only the warning of rolling clouds from the horizon and typically feature dangerous lightning, tornados are also too common and you even get meteor showers. The weather effects in The Solus Project are very well done and carry a real sense of concern. You will find yourself strongly motivated to stop what you are doing and find some shelter nearby to wait out the storm. As well as food and drink, your character has to sleep to survive. Storms can take hours of in-game time to pass so what else is there to do but catch forty winks while you wait for it to blow over?
Once you finish the first survival steps the game prods you into exploring the area, trying to find survivors and work out how you can communicate to your people off-planet. After some time spent being in this mindset, you'll quickly realise that survival is in fact largely trivial in this game. Food and water sources are plentiful, at least in the first few hours, and your biggest problem is managing the very small inventory space you have when you start. I guess it is realistic not to be able to hold much, and you can upgrade your storage by finding backpacks in wrecked bits of ship and life pods. But after going so heavy on the survival element and making you think you need to horde food and water, you realise that actually travelling light is the best option. All you need to do is run for cover when the weather comes in and, hey, you're surviving just fine on this supposedly hostile planet.
The game prods you into your first few discoveries, you find another person in their camp and see they were also trying to build a way of communicating off planet and then the game helps you with getting the first few parts. Then all the help stops suddenly.
As someone who doesn't necessarily need to be hand-held through open world games, I explored for the next hour and had a very good time before I saved and finished my gaming session.
Graphics and Sound
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| The day and night skies are very pretty |
I always start with sound in these sections because it seems easier to review 😁. The sound in The Solus Project is very atmospheric. The high points are when you are suffering the extreme weather, you can hear the wind whipping around you, rain falling hard, meteorites striking all around you. Other than the weather however, sound is relegated to plodding steps, the bing of some piece of tech nearby, the sound of fire on your old-school torch and the movement of wind.
The graphics in the game are quite detailed and successfully immerse you into this somewhat barren landscape. However, much like sounds outside the storms, none of it is particularly memorable in the first few hours. Landscapes are convincing if dull, the dark sky at night is very pretty with stars and during the day quite beautiful with the alien planets close up in the sky. The skies are well done, but you don't spend much time looking up in this game so you soon forget the sky. Landscapes are barren, caves dull. Again, I guess this is realistic, but it's not very exciting. Overall, however, you do have to say the overall immersion is of a very high standard.
The game engine seems to run well. I don't recall much in the way of stuttering, no SteamVR loading screens randomly popping in, load times are deliberate and only occuring during area transitions, the game runs fine, except....
The Game Breaker
Having played for 3 hours I decided to save and finish my session. The game focusses on realism and I was having enough fun to want to keep exploring and see what happens next. So I was looking forward to starting up again the next day.
The next day, I loaded the savegame, and appear 20 feet under ground level and I start falling away from the game world. Hoping this is a one-off, I reloaded again, and the same thing happened. I reloaded a third time just in case, same thing again.
So basically my save is corrupted and I can't continue.
The game has an autosave feature so I tried that. The save loads fine, but the autosave was during the last area transition, and I probably played 1 to 1.5 hours and completed a whole bunch of tasks before I manually saved, so that is not good enough.
The game has a device which allows you to teleport short distances, so I wondered if I could use that to reload and quickly teleport back above ground again to salvage my savegame. I tried maybe 20 times, but the device does not behave predictably in this unpredictable situation, so it is no good.
So I uninstalled the game and I won't be going back for now.
There is absolutely no excuse for this kind of ridiculous save-breaking game-breaking bug in a game which is £14.99 at full price. This save game corrupted at the end of my first play session. If it is going to happen that soon in the game then it could be a common bug for all I know, and I'm not going to risk my game time with that. Indeed, a very quick search on Google brings up multiple results with other players having the same problem, results going back more than a year.
This is exactly what I am talking about when I say you take a risk every time you buy an Indie VR game. I can't say I have ever come across such a heinous and ridiculous save corruption bug before. Even in Bethesda games like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls series which have been glitchy in their time (particularly Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas), the game developers cover this by giving you multiple regular autosaves so although it can be annoying, the worst that can happen is you lose 30 minutes of gameplay.
This is why I'm taking the opportunity during the Steam sales to buy these games. I would have been absolutely raging if I'd spent £14.99 on this only for it to crap out after 3 hours. As it stands, at £7.49, I'm still going to try for my first ever Steam refund, I'm not content to patiently wait potentially another year to see if they'll fix this problem.
Verdict
I am disgusted with such an awful game-breaking bug. A very quick search on Google shows that this is a fairly common problem that has been going on for at least a year, and it still isn't fixed.I have to recommend to everyone to avoid buying this game, discounted or not!
Avoid!
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