A survival sandbox having too much progression might sound like an odd complaint. After all, don’t you want a lot of things to work toward? But the problem that I found in my initial time with Atypical Games’ and Gaijin Entertainment’s Cubic Odyssey is that the potential of what’s out there feels way too walled off.
I will say I didn’t feel motivated enough to push forward too far because I wasn’t able to play this game online with MJ, and this kind of game really sucks solo. And for better or worse, I’m going to make at least one comparison between this game and No Man’s Sky purely because it feels like the closest analogue – a sci-fi sandbox about exploring the stars and planets.
With that out of the way, let me share my impressions of a game that manages to balance typical tedium with some honestly helpful quality-of-life.
The whole thing starts off fine enough as a cutscene sets the stage for the reason you’re going to be in a wide galaxy. In short, some force known as the Red Darkness has attacked your character’s homeworld, and you’re tasked with finding a way to defeat it and liberate your planet. Naturally, this means that your spaceship has crashed into a planet that acts as your tutorial.
Straight away, the tutorialization kicks off as the game guides you through the initial crafting tables you need to establish a foothold on this new world. The guidance just keeps on going from there as Cubic tells you things like utilizing your little helpful drone QB-1, the importance of keeping your gear powered, and how to do things like find and mine minerals.
It’s at this point that, technically speaking, you don’t really have to do these individual steps. When I was joining with MJ for her stream of this game over the weekend, she elected to divert from the guided path and just build a base and repair a nearby crashed vehicle well ahead of time. There is literally nothing from stopping you from just pushing along through most of the steps, as far as I can tell.
All of these steps serve as a lead-up to the point when you can repair your crashed ship and start to make your way into the wider galaxy is pretty patently obvious, but the number of progression steps to get to this point feels a little bit oppressive, and despite your ability to do things out of the prescribed order, repairing your spaceship is hard-locked behind making progress in the “adventure” you’re started on.
So with that in mind, I decided to just continue plodding along through these opening stages. Each time, when I made a moment of forward progress, I was hit with another layer of something to do. I first had to build a crafting table. Then use that table to build essentials. Then that table helped me build a different table. And that table required extra materials to be built that necessitated more raw materials. And then that new table was used to build suit upgrades that required even more stacks of slightly more complex materials.
I think you get the idea at this point. It’s just a nonstop cavalcade of having to upgrade in increments, all while waiting for the forge to make ingots.
In fairness to Cubic Odyssey, there are a wide assortment of convenience features that make this all hum pretty cleanly. First of all, one unit of ore produces two units of ingots, which almost seems like anathema to these kinds of games. Second, there are UI features that let you quickly jump to needed recipes for components, meaning you’re not forced to search either in-game or in some wiki.
In addition The QB drone also provides some useful help, as it can join you in combat when you equip it with the right attachments and scan for either a specifically wanted material or for any nearby material of a tier; this was mighty useful at the point when I was supposed to find gold, which I hadn’t encountered previously. You can also filter out which materials to not pick up, so if you’re tired of having your pants filled with dirt and stone, that’s an option.
I also have to point out that there isn’t any hunger or thirst mechanic in play either, but that’s replaced with something that is arguably worse: the need to keep constantly making batteries. Pretty much everything you’re able to do is predicated on having a pool of energy, and that pool comes from batteries you have to craft and keep in your character’s pockets. When one battery dries up, another in your inventory does immediately get equipped, and if you’re out of juice, then your harvesting tool works far less effectively. It’s basically like having to have stacks and stacks of potions to survive encounters in an ARPG – a gameplay mechanic that I really dislike.
What makes this tedium all the worse is that there is a genuinely intriguing sense of more being out there. Once I repaired my speeder, the planet’s surface opened up to me and I was able to find a bunch of things just by toodling around. And when I opened the map to look at the star system and galaxy in total, I was incredibly impressed by the scale of potential.
But that’s all that there was. Potential. Nothing actually felt or gained.
Here’s the point when I stand this up aside No Man’s Sky, and not in terms of its depth or visibility or finances but in its design philosophy. Just like in Cubic, you find yourself on a planet with a battered ship, and you have to survive and gather materials. But NMSÂ recognizes the point when the actual meat of the game – exploring a wide open galaxy – should be given to you. Cubic Odyssey does not respect that urge, compelling you to instead follow these hard-wired requirements before you get to actually have anything resembling fun.
That fun is just not present in the opening portions of this game. It tries to be a bit too much like Minecraft or other such contemporaries and assumes you’ll have a great time constantly harvesting materials ad infinitum in order to slowly walk up the equipment tiers. And maybe this will appeal to you, but I’m not that kind of survivalbox fan. I don’t mind being eased into things, but this doesn’t feel like a slope so much as an extremely slow-moving escalator.
And again, this might have been more fun if MJ and I were allowed to play together, but the online functionality was just not working when we were live together for the stream. I did attempt to see if online play worked about a day later, and sure enough, the multiplayer component was functioning, so the two of us just got “lucky” with that bug. But then I don’t know that multiplayer would make this game suddenly fun; all it would do is spread the tedium around so that all of the constant chores wouldn’t feel like an albatross around my neck.
I was honestly hoping for a lot more exploration and openness in Cubic Odyssey, but all I’ve experienced in my opening steps is a never-ending honey-do list. And after a certain point, I stopped caring about potential and just uninstalled this game. Maybe if you’re a bigger Minecraft-like fan than I am, you can find something fun in Cubic Odyssey, or perhaps you can survive this drawn-out opening. But personally speaking, I know there are a lot more survivalbox games that don’t take hours to spool up anything interesting.
