OFFICIAL Fractured Space (Review)

[RCoon]

Introduction

Fractured Space is a MoBA-like based in space, and with total three dimensional movement. It is developed and published by Edge Case Games Ltd, using the Unreal Engine 4. It seems to come across as a relatively fast paced PVP style MoBA, but in reality is actually pretty slow, and relatively tactical in most cases. It currently lacks any real community, and is extremely early on in Steam Early Access. It is unknown if it will turn into a F2P style model, but it is currently a pay once game. There are certainly hints that it might take on the capacity for in-game purchases. It may not, but the potential is there, it has a number of ships, loadouts, and experience system, as well as an in-game currency system. Most of these are largely unfinished, or merely placeholder for future updates.

Storyline

As it holds to its genre of a 5v5 fleet versus fleet style MoBA, there is currently no essence of story-line, nor is there word of such a thing becoming a thing. I’m not wholly convinced it needs one at all, and I’m unsure how such a thing would be approached.

Gameplay

On the initial Hanger screen before each match you choose your ship class. Once you’ve chosen a role, you can customise the loadout, though currently there are very few alterations available besides a few weapon choices (most of which are either overpowered or entirely useless), and some ability alterations. More will obviously become available, though it seems possible that changing these loadouts will happen in a match via the upgrade mechanic when it comes to fruition. You can also choose your crew, which does nothing more than change the audio in-game. I’d like to see these crew choices become more important, offering different passives and for there to be more choice of crew members. There is certainly scope for these systems to become more influential and deep.

There’s quite little variation in the current build in terms of gameplay. There’s only one map so far for your standard 5v5 game mode, which is very much a cross between your standard MoBA gameplay, and Conquest style capture and hold objectives. The current map has five separated areas, which you’re only able to jump between using your jump drive ability. Each team has their own base on either side of the map. This is a fairly large area, with the base in the middle, with two smaller objective points either side. Capturing the enemy base outright is near improbable, but not impossible. In order to unlock the enemy base as an accessible area via your jump drive, you must first capture two objectives in either the Alpha or Beta sector, named A1 & A2, or B1 & B2. Once you’ve got two in one sector, you can jump to the enemy base. If you only control a single point in these sectors, attempting to capture the enemy base will incur a persistent damage over time effect. While is dissuades new players, experienced players know they can end the game that way with some alternate capturing with multiple ships. This partially ruins the game somewhat for me, and needs to be made far more difficult, perhaps with actual defence systems, or complete denial if you don’t control at least two points.

The rest of the map is the Alpha and Beta Sectors, as well as a Gamma sector. The Gamma sector is a central point, where after eight minutes, and every few minutes thereafter, a team can capture the station to gain a Gas resource increase. Besides fighting over this point during those times, Gamma is rarely used as a point of interest or battleground. The two most important areas in the game are the Alpha and Beta Sectors. Each has a 1 and 2 base, as well as 3 stations between the two. These stations incur a small resource bonus for your team, but do not count towards any objectives for win conditions. Points 1 and 2 are reasonably far apart, and feature an indestructible front facing wall to hide behind when under siege. It’s quite useful for the Sniper class to pop out of to take pot shots at an incoming enemy fleet. It’s also useful to hide behind when capturing a station, if the enemy is further in the middle of the sector.

Resources accumulate, and at certain values of resource your team will gain a level. Currently levels provide nothing more than passive improvements, usually increasing ship defences and damage, but these improvements can’t be attained until you reach a team held station to apply them. In future, these upgrades will be more interactive and player chosen. In addition to these in-match resources, there is game resources and experience. Experience levels you as a caption up, and credits are the games currency. Currently these are entirely worthless, and don’t do anything. In future the credits will be used to unlock ships, as well as various loadout options for each ship class. It may eventually be the case that credits will be used for a lot more. It’s not entirely clear what levelling your profile will work towards.

There are a number of ships with very clear and separate roles, which is something I quite like. Too many games within this genre blur the lines between characters too much, but in this game I know exactly which ship is needed for a certain situation. Some ships have stealth, some ships have stealth detection. Some ships are extremely quick; other ships have engine disabling abilities, but move excessively slowly. Most of the ships bar the Frigate and Assassin move ridiculously slowly. It’s definitely something that needs work, because ships and the overall game feels much too slow, and this means evading enemy fire is near impossible. The game is also supposed to be 5v5 based, but because there are so few players in the whole community, you rarely have a full team. There is also very little done to stop players simply leaving the game, other than not giving them the experience or credits for that particular match. There is no matchmaking currently either, so of the ten or so servers, you have to hope people have already grouped into one server. Otherwise you have to choose a server and sit in it for twenty minutes and wait for players to join. Often a match will start with two or three players on a team, in some cases it often begins as a 2v2 or 2v3.

Combat, while slow and sometimes very one-sided is actually quite fun. It’s also a pretty great light show to watch. There’s a reasonable variation in the current weapons, their damage and their cooldown time, so capitalising on your available abilities and weapon cool downs is a must, as well as keeping in mind your enemies’ options too. There are a number of playstyles based around which role of ship you’ve chosen. It’s quite important to learn your role and to stick by it; otherwise it can be quite detrimental. A Flagship needs to be at the forefront taking all the damage and providing area of effect damage, while the Frigate and Hunter need to keep the enemy on their toes and detecting nearby Assassins. It’s also pretty important for the Assassins to dispatch the Snipers who stay isolated at the rear. Overall the emphasis on roles and team play is excellent, and some of the best role definition I’ve seen in a MoBA.

Controls

Controls are reasonably simple, with ‘W’A’S’D’ controlling flat plane movement, and ‘SHIFT’ and ‘CTRL’ operating ascent and descent. Left Click is your typical fire button, and Right Click is usually a special ability of some sort, something along the lines of a damage increase or an ability that causes some sort of disability to your opponent. Your NUM keys 1 through 6 operate other active abilities depending on what ship you’ve chosen, and what sort of loadout upgrades you’ve equipped. Some ships may have more abilities than others. NUM key 4 is your Jump Drive, which is used to travel between Alpha, Beta and Gamma sectors, as well as your team and the enemy team’s base, though it does incur a cooldown. You can access the player panel with ‘TAB’, which will show you player performance, ship class, as well as their current activity.

Video Settings

We’re slightly lacking the basics in this department. You’ve got your standard fullscreen and resolution options, as well as some very basic texture and AA options. VSync however is nowhere to be seen. It turns out however the game does support such an option, it’s just they evidently chose not to put a button there. Instead you have to go into config files, which is where you can edit a few more exciting options. And by few more I mean VSync. You can find this file in steamapp\common\space\spacegame\config\DefaultGameUserSettings.ini. It’s a simply task to make a single button that changes a value from True to False, why it hasn’t been fitted into the base game, even in Early Access, is beyond my understanding. Maybe there’s a reason, I have yet to find out. That said, head on over to System Performance, and you might understand why turning VSync on would be useful.

System Performance

CPU: i5 4670 (Stock)
GPU: MSI GTX 970 (Stock)
RAM: 16GB 2133mhz
Storage: WD 1TB 7200RPM
Display: 2560 x 1440

It looks like the game is limited to using only 2cores/2threads, which is a bit of a killer in this case. You can clearly see the GPU is never fully loaded, and the processor never seems to go beyond 50% usage. The game seems extremely processor heavy, except because of this limit of using half of the processor, the GPU never really catches up. I understand its Early Access, and optimisation is yet to come, but it seems clear to me that the game is in desperate need of a few extra threads. I wouldn’t expect good framerates unless you’re rocking a modern dual core Intel with some heavy lifting IPC behind it.

Running at maxed settings my rig seems almost capable of 60FPS on 1080p, but starts to suffer badly at 1440p. The CPU is flat out and the GPU still has room to stretch. Texture-wise it doesn’t seem to use an awful lot of memory. The game is reasonably pretty, although the AA is extremely heavy handed with the current ship models, and makes them look extremely faded around the edges to account for the low res textures and jaggies. Weapon fire looks rather pretty, but the game lags so hard during battles between three or more ships, you often miss your target because the aiming reticule has yet to catch up.

The game is also currently only available on 64bit machines, running DirectX11 capable video hardware.

1440p

Spoiler

1080p

Spoiler

Recommended Hardware

You’re gonna need a pretty good CPU for this game as it is, but for GPU, there seems to be quite a margin for budgeting. I’d recommend an i3 with the highest stock clocks as minimum, or a Hexa-core FX beyond the 4Ghz mark. For higher systems available heavily overclocked i5 for the performance on those 2 cores are the best possible solution, an i7 here wouldn’t help. In terms of GPU, any midrange offering from both camps, with at least 2GB of VRAM would be required. On release I expect decent GPU optimisations, but CPU not so much. The Unreal Engine 4 has some good optimisations so far, though there’s more to come.

Conclusion

Overall the potential is most definitely there. Space battleship battles on a fully 3D map with very clear roles and rather shiny weapons are certainly an awesome thing to imagine and look at. The bitter reality is the game is simply too slow and sluggish, both in performance and gameplay. Ships move far too slowly, and the game performs poorly on high end hardware, causing issues with targeting during fights. Besides two of the ship classes, most of the time you cruise along at a snail’s pace trading blows at each other, hoping your weapon inflicts more damage and you have more health at the start of the fight. Weapons feel empty, and lack punch and force, but there is a reasonable variation. My main issues with the weapons are that there are some very clear imbalances, and most of the heavy players stick to a specific load out for each class. Assassins always leave the game with the most kills, and can one-shot any ship bar the flagship with a single spray of the plasma cannon after activating the ambush ability. It’s rather frustrating, but after having played as the assassin class, I know just how easy it is to kill anyone you’re faced with.

System performance is terrible, but they have taken the chance to limit themselves to Unreal Engine 4, which means no 32bit customers, and all of them must have GPU’s with DirectX 11 support as a minimum. Not to mention the fact you simply can’t play with all the pretty lights turned on without a strong processor. The lack of a VSync button is immensely irritating, especially in this case because the setting does actually exist. It’s rather sloppy development. Objectives in the gameplay are a little lax, and there have been multiple occasions where a team can simply ignore both Alpha and Beta objectives and simply cap the enemy based and take the damage it causes. Bases are capped far too quickly, and ships move so slowly it’s impossible to stop the enemy once they’re on your base. Some weapons are literally pointless, and the only real 5v5 gameplay is when the Gas Station at Gamma is up for control. The current map is quite bland, but actually relatively balanced for both teams, unfortunately it’s just not populated, and extremely empty feeling.

There are an enormous amount of issues with the games current state, but I would like to stress that I think I would very much enjoy this game when it’s complete. The team play elements and extremely clear role positions are something that makes the game more skilful and satisfying. I like ship battles, and provided the various issues I’ve seen are addressed in some way, I think it’ll be relatively popular. Unfortunately that’s rarely the case with Early Access, and by the time it releases there will be nobody left to play. Currently I can barely find a server with more than five or six people at once, teams are always odd, and people regularly leave and join in the middle of a match. The game’s downfall is going to be the player base if the devs don’t attempt to build one.

Fractured Space is available on Steam Early Access for £6.99/$9.99