As an old school PC gamer, when someone mentions the word Descent I get a little dizzy. The original claustrophobic six degrees of freedom shooter, Descent put you in control of a ship deep underground rescuing miners and shooting baddies. When Miner Wars 2081 was announced it was easy to make the comparison and hope to recapture some of that magic that was felt while playing Descent. Miner Wars 2081 is an ambitious part of a larger puzzle in the Miner Wars universe that includes an eventual MMO. The groundwork is laid here with a full campaign spanning 30 plus missions and support for up to 16 players in co-op.
The game puts you into the shoes of Apollo and his brother Marcus as they try to uncover why their peaceful mining operation was suddenly attacked by Russian enemies. The universe of Miner Wars exists after a bizarre gravity incident destroys all planets in the universe leaving only rocky asteroid filled systems that once harvested life throughout the galaxy. Throughout the game you’ll travel between these systems and the bases located on them, fighting enemies not only in space, but inside the asteroids themselves.
At times Miner Wars 2081 can look really pretty, while other times the environments feel bland and barren. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what it is, but there seems to be two dichotomic graphical styles - one almost realistic while another is almost cartoony - and these depend on which area you are actually in. Controlling your ship with the WASD keys and mouse works well enough and there’s even the ability to strafe in multiple directions. Your ship itself is fully customizable as you can salvage or purchase equipment to customize weapons, armor, fuel, and other extra goodies.
Obviously with a name like Miner Wars you’d think mining plays a big part in the gameplay, or at least some part. Sadly it just seems like a small distraction, it’s never a requirement other than the select few times you have to dig through part of an asteroid. Your HUD will be filled with various mineral deposit locations, which you can mine and then sell for a profit - but I never was short on items or salvage from the normal missions to need to waste time doing this. Perhaps that was for the better.
One thing to be said about Miner Wars 2081 is its a brutally difficult game. On normal you’ll find yourself dying many times over as you are faced with dozens upon dozens of enemies. Part of this issue with this is the game’s combat system which leaves me with an unsatisfied feeling. It’s best expressed when you watch someone get hit by a few stray bullets and watch the model spin uncontrollably for a few seconds. It just looks silly and floaty - and shooting the enemies in Miner Wars 2081 feels the same. There’s just no punch to it, it’s like shooting cardboard with a BB gun. It’s sad too because there’s a deceptively deep ship system at play - with full armor, oxygen, hull integrity and other systems you need to worry about. You can become damaged to a point where your ship leaks oxygen and you’ll need to find or use a repair kit and then refill your ship’s oxygen as well or else you’ll die. These random items are left around the game world and instead of picking them up, you simply go up to them and press the space bar. Again, it’s just unsatisfying.
The missions in the game’s campaign do offer a nice variety of objectives. There’s plenty of "go here and kill that," but the game does a nice job of breaking up the paths to these. In one mission you raid a pirate warehouse while another has you teaming up with some pirates to defend their base - placing turrets in strategic locations and holding position until reinforcements arrive. It’s these little diversions that help keep things fresh and the missions themselves are fully voice acted and each help move the story forward nicely. There’s a solid waypoint system as well to help you if you get lost. Without it, the game would be even more difficult.
The entire campaign can be played in co-op too, with up to 16 players. While that seems to work ok for 3 or 4 players, I was unable to find any games available with more than that. It was difficult to tell just how the game scaled the difficulty for multiple players, but we were told the game does scale up or down based on the number of players present. Sadly the same combat issues I had with the game’s single player combat persist in co-op. Sure it’s nice to have a few wingmen by your side, but the AI aren’t really challenging targets, they just aren’t the easiest to kill. They’ll fly straight towards your group with no regard for four players shooting machine guns at them, but absorb the bullets and fire back just as if you aren’t even there.
I have to commend Keen Software on trying to integrate a seamless co-op experience. Every game by default is a co-op game and open for anyone to join at any time. Sadly, despite that, most of the time I played I rarely had a random person jump into my game. There’s just very little incentive. On top of that joining a game features some really obscenely long loading times and at times it just flat out doesn’t work.
Which brings me to the bugs in the game in general. I hit a handful of mission breaking bugs causing me to replay an entire mission. I ran into connection issues and later on I actually hit a point where the entire game would crash regardless of which component I loaded. I’ve been playing Miner Wars 2081 since the alpha and through the beta as well, while I’ve seen solid progress and polish, it definitely wasn’t ready for release.
There’s a lot of potential here in Miner Wars 2081, it seems like a game that could be a blast at LAN parties despite the internet connection DRM requirement. If you can get past the shallow combat there’s an expansive universe to explore and have some fun with. With a full editor and some modability there’s a chance Miner Wars 2081 can become something better and realize its full potential. As it stands now it simply makes me yearn for a true sequel to Descent.
A Steam code was provided by the developer for review purposes.