Thunder Revisits: Osiris New Dawn

By: ThunderHeavyArmSo it's been a while since I've been able to really sit down and play anything. So we'll be looking back at a few early access titles for the next few weeks and see how they've come in their development. First up, Osiris New Dawn.So not much has changed about the base game from the earlier version. You still gather resources and explore the environment. There's no story to the single player campaign as of yet, but the game is still in development. The game starts out almost exactly the same, you crashed on Proteus 2 and need to quickly repair your suit. The developers added a crashed shuttle in your starting area, giving the player a jump start to getting a structure working. What I was able to quickly notice as different was my starting area. Not because of any graphical changes—there were a few of these—but that my starting area was completely different from my first play through. After a few restarts (read: rage quits), I was able to figure out that the game now has a random spawn engine. While I could understand the idea that crashing doesn't allow the player control, I wasn't a fan of this given that many of my restarts were in very resource devoid areas.While not the most obvious change, the next feature that was added has definitely stuck with me past my initial replay. Random enemy spawns. Now I know when I said this to some people they compared it to Minecraft, where at night random enemies would spawn around you and attack. The game will randomly spawn random groups of alien monsters with varying difficulties. While this is a great way to add excitement to an established game, it makes a starting game completely hit or miss. A single bad spawn could potentially take multiple deaths to clear out of the aliens consuming time for resource gathering, which you'll need to survive the first couple of nights on the planet.A previous complaint that I made in my last review was how starved I felt for experience points in this game. In the previous version, a kill got you 1 experience point. Now, kills will net you between 10-15 XP. In addition, there are three groups of research: engineering, science, and combat. Each of these then has four subgroups that level depending on different actions. Engineering levels from mining, constructing buildings, crafting items and building vehicles. Combat levels based on what weapon you're firing with so melee, light, assault and special weapons. Finally, science levels from botany, chemistry and gathering gas. Funnily enough, hitting resources with your hammer gets you both engineering and combat experience. Also, shooting plants will get you combat skills with no threat of retaliation.I know that I'm leaving this review on somewhat of a negative note, but it's starting to get a bit too long and there's more that I want to talk about. So, next time I'll be going over the combat and construction aspects of the game. I'll then follow that up with a review of the game as it currently is including a couple of highlights from my play through. Until next time explorers.