REVIEW : ΔV: Rings of Saturn (PC)
The unanticipated discovery of lucrative minerals within Saturn’s rings has inspired a burgeoning space exploration industry. You’re in charge of an asteroid excavation ship, intending to earn a fortune off of the rings, but things aren’t quite as they seem. Experience a hard sci-fi novel that is backed up by real science and physics.
The strangest thing we’ve been obsessed about for decades is the notion of flying through lonely space in search of spices and minerals. My own adventure began with Microsoft’s ambitious Freelancer and ended with the cosmic stage of Spore. Of course, many other games have attempted, with varied degrees of success, to make open-ended space exploration enjoyable. This is why I’m looking forward to seeing yet another effort at our quest of reviewing this game. V: Saturn’s Rings is a strange game with a similar theme. You pilot an asteroid excavator ship and try to gain money by mining rich minerals from space rocks. At its most basic level, it’s just your standard space exploration game. However, after a few minutes, you’ll realise there’s a lot more to it.
The focus of V: Rings of Saturn isn’t so much on space encounters and the magic of space as it is on the characters. For the most part, you’ll be ringing, mining, selling at the station, and repeating. Accidents, pirate encounters, and emergencies keep things interesting at all times. However, the game’s mechanics are what keep it entertaining.
The game is ridiculously nerdy. I wasn’t expecting such a difficult time manoeuvring my spacecraft or handling its engines and equipment. But here I was, with a lot of ground to cover. The game advertises itself as a difficult Science Fiction game, and I agree. There is depth and realism in the game for everything that is in it. Like in all my favourite space exploration games, I couldn’t whiz over asteroid showers at lightspeed. Although it is a game, you must nevertheless adhere to the principles of physics. V: Saturn’s Rings has a number of things going for it. But first, let’s go through the basics. In a matter of minutes, you’ll be propelled into space and given the task of piloting your ship – and believe it or not, it’ll be a problem. The physics system makes manoeuvring space immensely pleasurable, whether you use the autopilot system or do it manually. The beginning of the game is important in holding you in to master the other even more complex mechanics, especially when combined with a competent not-too-hands-on tutorial. And speaking of amazing mechanics, one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game has to be controlling your subsystems, ship, and crew. Everything here is, once again, highly thorough and in-depth. However, running out of things to learn and do in an open-ended game like this is basically a death sentence for your enjoyment. I couldn’t resist going for just one more run every time I returned to sell “treasure” and upgrade my ship and crew.
After all, I needed to see my new gear and team in action. Overall, if you’re ready to put in the effort to learn the ropes, the game will reward you well. V: Rings of Saturn rewards your inquisitiveness with extra mechanics to master. It’s up to you if this is for you or not, but it certainly does what it sets out to do.
However, even after you’ve learned everything, you’ll find yourself alone in space. Yes, the game is deep, but it lacks the substance I had hoped for. All you’re met with is a concrete wall after navigating the mechanics while narrowly escaping annoyance. I learned a lot in just over 6 hours of gameplay.
My ship was the Ferrari of miner spaceships, and I had a crew. I’d blown up the largest asteroid I’d ever seen. The just-one-more feeling started to wear off as I realised that my progress at that point was all about arbitrary successes I made to amuse myself. Furthermore, forgettable NPC interactions bring the excitement to an end far sooner than it should. It’s thrilling the first time because you won’t see anyone else for quite some time. However, once you’ve gotten used to it, you’ll most likely try to avoid any NPCs. It’s worth noting that the game is still in its early stages. It’s to be expected that there would be a lack of substance. The developers are trying their best and are always open to suggestions.
You might end up like me unless you are a major fan of space exploration games and the immense nothingness that comes with them. You’ll be able to get past V: Rings of Saturn’s challenging physics without feeling it thanks to extremely enjoyable and precise control. You’ll feel a feeling of achievement as you grow your company, personnel, and equipment, which will motivate you to try for more. However, it finishes far too soon, and after a while, there will be no purpose in continuing to play. You’ll be disappointed if you’re searching for NPCs to help you extend your gaming.If you want to nerd out about spaceships and reminisce about old school games, V: Rings of Saturn is a terrific game to play. It’ll give you a good run over the weekend, but it’ll most likely collect metaphorical dust in your Steam library after that. If you enjoy space exploration, you should definitely download this game; it will not disappoint. There is no need in defining the game’s premise because it features a free demo, which is the best method to see if it is for you or not. Instead, I’d want to express why I like it. It’s one of those games where you either hate it or love it, with no in-between. This is due to the fact that ship control is fairly difficult. I’d even go so far as to argue that navigating a starship in games is similar to driving a go-kart: you have instantaneous acceleration, can spin like you’re on rails, and can stop on a dime. Inertia is minimised to the point that its impact is comparable to when Mario switches directions in Super Mario Bros. and slides for only a pixel or two before speeding up in the opposite direction. You’ll require some time to accelerate to any acceptable speed, turning takes the area of a small nation, and the only time you’ll be immobile is when you use your autopilot to match your speed to an asteroid. The effort to keep control of your spaceship is what makes this game so enjoyable. The game demands a significant amount of work merely to fly the ship, and if maintaining control of your spacecraft despite the difficulty seems satisfying to you, then you will like. If you don’t, you’ll assume it’s just a game with lousy controls and nothing else to offer. I’ll compare the controls of to those of the driving game Juiced, in which you could spin out even while changing lanes at high speeds, and if you had a RWD car, you had to entirely let off the throttle when turning a corner or you’d oversteer. In comparison to NFS Underground 2, it felt strange and needlessly challenging.The gameplay is also really enjoyable. Each lump of ore freed from its frozen sheath yields a varying reward, sometimes far more than expected, but generally a pittance. Even lower yields are valuable, as long as the water content is adjusted. It’s time to exit the ring and return to the station at some point. Then you land, pay in your ore, improve a few things, and it’s time to embark on yet another procedural journey across Saturn’s rings. There’s a strong desire to do one more ring dive here.While the game does obey physics in theory, it does it in a way that is simple to overlook. Objects have momentum, and anything as simple as collecting an ore piece may cause your ship to slow down enough to be noticed, especially after you’re halfway through a dive and your ship isn’t dropping down as rapidly as it used to. Suddenly, the thing you’d ordinarily run away from may catch up with you, and you’re knee deep in shattered RCS thrusters after slamming that asteroid. Another consideration is damage modelling. Your spacecraft’s hull is robust, manufactured from the best materials Enceladus Prime has to offer, and it’s resistant to buckling even under the most extreme conditions; the trouble is that the insides of your ship aren’t as well protected. If you strike a ringdroid with your RCS thrusters, you’ll lose most of your control over it and have to navigate with your remaining thrusters, which increases the likelihood of further damage. The pleasure, though, is not only about chasing carrots. The task of swiftly gathering the rocks without crashing your spacecraft into them is one that can be sustained. At its core, it’s a physics game: your ship, the objects in its vicinity, and the ore within react to a good approximation of the forces at work.
