So this review going to be short and concise which is apt because that’s very much what The Starship Damprey happens to be. It’s a 2-3 hour-long experimental adventure in which you explore the confines of an empty spaceship and try to discern what happened there. Not the most original premise but the way Level 5 tells this familiar tale makes it a bit more interesting, this is mainly because they tell you almost nothing. This is a game with no tutorials, no hints, and no explanations, it’s just you and a quiet dark claustrophobic space to fumble around in.

Have you tried unplugging it then plugging it back in again?

That feeling of uselessness and a complete lack of knowledge is infused through every part of the game. The game starts with you waking up in a hibernation capsule and having to reboot said capsule’s OS which requires figuring out and entering a variety of odd commands. From there you find yourself stuck in the capsule by some outside force and, of course, stricken with amnesia. Your only recourse is to pilot a clunky cumbersome robot around to try to figure out what the hell is going on. The outlook is grim though as you find only bodies, darkness, and an uneasy silence. I won’t say anything more regarding the story as things evolve in some interesting ways and everything ends with an expected but well executed twist. I will also say that for all the sullen quiet pathos of the story the game also has a few moments of levity that really help add just that extra little layer of enjoyment.

The gameplay here is pretty much a classic adventure game but from a first person perspective; you’ll be wandering around looking for stuff to use with other stuff so you can make a path open and you’ll doing it though the eyes of what looks like the robot from Rocky 4 mixed with the Herbie robot from that terrible Fantastic Four cartoon. The controls are intentionally clunky and limiting and the OS you rebooted earlier constantly holds you back from doing what you want to do but again that’s kind of the point. You’ll spend a lot of time just wandering the halls of the ship and getting a feel for the very limited functions your robot and it’s very engaging and immersive experience. The gameplay is very passive in that sense, a lot of observing the situation and figuring out a solution that fits your meager capabilities; it’s a good dynamic and it works really well on a handheld. I do have one problem with the gameplay though and that is the game’s tendency to hide quest important items in the corners of the environments and out of regular view. You see in order to look around you have to switch from a movement mode (where the camera is fixed) to a camera mode where you can free look around. While that’s not an arduous process it can lead you to think that you’ve fully explored an area when you really haven’t and getting stuck thanks to that doesn’t feel like a puzzle so much as poor level design.

The most frightening monster of all, Girl in Sunhat!

That same sentiment of poor design can’t be said for the visuals because while simple they’re very evocative and really help complement the story’s themes of isolation and loneliness. The dark drab grey hallways and featureless utilitarian equipment with remnants of human personality and kindness left upon them speak beautifully of a dead and entirely unknown world. It helps make the amnesia angle feel like far more than just cliché but actually important to the story. I will say the environments do look a little on the budgety side of things but it works for what the game is trying to do. Regardless the presentation does a fantastic job of setting up the necessary atmosphere and helping the story unfold in just the right ways.

In the end The Starship Damprey is a pretty interesting little experiment in storytelling and while it is overall a fairly basic game in terms of actual gameplay, some interesting puzzles and a smart story you can’t help but want to finish give it an edge. It’s a little short and if it was going for a horror aspect (which it feels like it was) it doesn’t quite hit that mark but it has a good twist at the end and the atmosphere is well done. For $8 you could do worse but if you’re thinking of picking this one up, be aware it’s the type of experience you’re not going to get a ton out of or come back to; it’s a solemn short exhale into a strange and unfamiliar world. This being the case The Starship Damprey gets a 3 out of 5 stars, a curious little game with a lot of artistic merit and some decent puzzles but not a ton else.

Sanctum was an interesting game, a Tower Defense/FPS hybrid that balanced those two genres quite well and had a really neat aesthetic. It definitely garnered a lot of attention and it gained quite a multiplayer community from what I’ve heard, as such it only makes sense that a sequel was in the works and is now on our review plate. That said I personally think that the original game is the superior of the two titles because while this game fixes a lot of the issues the first game had (and we’ll go into that soon enough) there’s too hefty focus on multiplayer here that does more to hinder than to help. If you’re already neck-deep in the Sanctum community and have a reliable foursome to conquer the invading hordes with then you can disregard this review but if you plan on playing alone or with randoms then you may want to keep reading before you whip out your wallet.

Between all the perks, new characters, new weapons, and new towers you can really build a specific play style.

So the sheer basics here are the same as in the last game; you will build a variety of towers, you will upgrade those towers, and you’ll shoot a whole bunch of monsters. Where things get new and interesting though is the outlying systems that you use to customize the way you build and shoot. Probably the best example of this is the fact that there are now four playable characters rather than just the one, each has their own primary weapon and trait that is unique to them and changes the way you play significantly. If you’re planning on taking the hordes on mano-a-mano then you’ll want to use Hagen, the shotgunner with a bunch of extra health. Or let’s say you want to let your towers do the heavy lifting, then the rocket launching tween Sweet or the sniper rifle robot SiMo will allow you to deal death from afar and keep out of the action. There are also a bunch of perks, secondary weapons, and new towers to unlock with a very nicely persistent leveling system that really allow you to carve out your own particular play style. The variety here is much appreciated as it was one of the things that the first game was sorely missing, in fact I’d go as far as to say it’s the best part of Sanctum 2 so hold that in your head because now I’m going to talk about what it does wrong.

All those walls with so few towers, it all looks so lonely.

One of the greatest things about the first game was the depth of the strategy, you weren’t super restricted in how and what you could build and while your tools may have been limited how you could use them sure wasn’t. That isn’t so much the case here as it seems they have kneecapped things for the sake of multiplayer. First off they have capped the amount of offensive towers you can place, about 10-15 is usual max and that’s for the whole party, this means your strategies need to be dialed back a bit. They’ve also made it harder to get a really good in-depth overview of the map; in the first game you had those watchtower blocks which gave you a good bird’s-eye view as well as a sniping position and you could go into an overview which let you teleport around the map, both those things are gone now. It also feels like you’re getting a lot fewer resources per round than before, if you’re lucky you’ll have enough to place or upgrade one or two towers per wave but not much more than that. Thankfully the basic wall blocks you actually build your offensive towers on top of are bought with a separate more plentiful currency so you can at the very least get a decent maze put together, but a maze with no towers is like going camping without a cooler full of beer, fucking boring and kind of pointless. I will give one small kudos here though by saying that the fact that you can recycle your towers at will for the full cost of those towers is pretty sweet as it means you can rejigger your whole strategy at will…assuming your team mates will let you of course.

I bet this maze will work great, assuming some asshole doesn’t break it.

And with that we come to my biggest complaint regarding this game, it’s only worth playing with other people and other people suck, or at least have a high potential to suck with this game. You see that recycling thing I just mentioned, anyone on the team can do it and can do it to any tower, including ones they didn’t place. This means that you can devise a perfect strategy that funnels enemies from every spawn point into an ultimate gauntlet of death that has no chance of failure and all it will take to ruin everything is some asshole going “Hurr, I is am smart, enemies surely won’t attack our base if I make sure they have a clear path leading right to it!”. At one point I joined a game that ended on the fourth wave because my partner had neglected to realize that a set super strong ranged enemies the game said would be coming could devastate our core from a catwalk he had neglected to block off. We lost and immediately decided to try again, this time with me taking charge of the maze design. I was feeling pretty confident as I had actually played the level before and had gotten much farther. This being the case I used a modified version of the design I originally used and we were doing quite well, then the fourth wave comes round and Shithead McGee decides to alter the design, unblocking the same fucking catwalk that got us killed last time; I didn’t notice and we died in the exact same fashion with those ranged guys destroying our core, again.

It was at this point I decided that multiplayer could fuck itself and I would just stick to single player, unfortunately for the anti-social lot single player in this game is either too easy or too hard depending on the mode you choose. Play on easy mode and you’ll rip enemies to shreds as they seem to have only about a quarter of the health they normally would and it feels like there’s less of them to fight, as you can imagine this means things get tedious pretty damn quick; also you’ll level pretty slowly this way so your strategies will start to stagnate. Play alone on the standard campaign difficulty though and you’ll quickly become overwhelmed by waves that are clearly designed to be handled by at least two people, you’ll get stuck in a lot of close to unwinnable and certainly not fun situations. I was almost tempted to start trying to interact with actual human beings again in the multiplayer but a few hosts dropping out mid-match and uncooperative partners letting me deal with bosses all on my lonesome knocked those thoughts out my head right quick.

Everything else aside this game really does look fantastic.

I will give one last point in Sanctum 2′s favour and that is the visual design, they’ve kept with the themes they had in the first game and expanded upon them quite well, creating a more interesting universe; on that note there is a story in this game but we’re not going to talk about it because it’s fairly inconsequential. Anyways, back to the visuals; everything has a really nice kind of Portal-esque chunky white ceramic look to it, lots of jutting yet rounded corners and unnecessary hovering components. This also goes for the characters, who all have super model body types attached to big clunky robot hands and bits of power armor. It all contrasts really well with the wild and untamed feel the levels and enemies have; lots of misty overgrown forests, rusted out factories, and lush jungles filled with darkly glowing tentacle beasts so you get a good technology conquering the unknown vibe from the overall design.

Whether this game is for you or not is going to boil down to whether you have a reliable group of buddies to play it with because when the stars align and you can actually get a full cooperative party together, the game seems like it would be pretty fun. Not everyone has that luxury though and if you’re playing solo or god forbid with randoms then the game pales in comparison to the first one. It’s simply too easy for people to be assholes and mess things up when you’re playing with people you don’t know and when you’re alone the game doesn’t really have the complexity necessary to keep it interesting. That being the case Sanctum 2 gets a 2 out of 5 stars, there just isn’t much fun here for anyone who isn’t already heavily invested in the Sanctum community and therefore already able to pull a decent cooperative group together.