Deep Space Anomaly from DRM GMZ (pronounced “Dream Games” if the voice over at the start of the game is to be believed), sees you partaking in some shooting. Lots of shooting. In lots of different directions. At a variety of targets. And that’s about the long and short of it.
Does that mean we should quietly brush it under the carpet and forget all about it?
It doesn’t start very well for Deep Space Anomaly, especially not in terms of any story, mostly as there isn’t one. We spawn into the game with a ship, and there are things that we need to shoot, but why we need to shoot them, what our motivation is, I have no idea. We have guns and therefore we have to use them – that is my best bet. In fact, all the game will tell us is that there are a number of enemy waves that we have to survive.
We’ll forget about a deep and engaging narrative and concentrate on the way the game is presented. And here, the news is no better.
Our spaceship seems to be static in the middle of the screen, and we can spin around and shoot a variety of small foes. We can move, but the ship does stay pretty still, and the background seems to scroll around as we try to get out of the way of the suicidal enemies. The graphics are basic in the extreme, and I can almost feel my Xbox Series X blushing at what I am asking it to display.
The biggest joke is that Deep Space Anomaly is supposedly optimised for the Series X|S consoles. I hate to think what a non-optimised version would look like!
Without coming across as a broken record, the sound is poor too. The soundtrack is a collection of some awful dance tracks that sound like teenagers banging garden furniture together, and it doesn’t fit the style or pace of the game at all. It really is jarring, and very loud. And the sounds of the guns and explosions are weedy and lost in the general uproar. Honestly, I can feel my dislike for the game growing as I type.
So, let’s address the final piece of the jigsaw, the last hope Deep Space Anomaly has of getting anything resembling a good score. How does the shooting action play out? Is it enough to save things?
Well, the short answer is no. The slightly longer answer is not a flipping chance, but we’ll look at why I say this.
First off is the perspective – we are zoomed right in and can only see a small portion of the screen, with the enemies coming from all directions. They aren’t at all shy about crashing into you and destroying your ship either. What that means is that we have a very restricted field of view, and fast, suicidal enemies – can you see where I’m going with this? There is literally no time to react to an enemy appearing and then it hitting you, and trying to fly around actually makes the matter worse.
The default gun that our ship is armed with has about six shots before it has to reload, leaving you defenceless. Whoever thought that strapping a revolver to the outside of a spaceship needs to reconsider their career choice, as it doesn’t work. Luckily, there is an in-game shop at the end of every wave, where you can spend the funds that you have accrued over the wave to buy new bits. These can be health or shield upgrades, for instance, but surely the first order of business has to be new weapons to replace the peashooters we have been issued with.
Or it would be the first stop if I could buy something. I managed to finish one wave with over 5000 units of currency, and so went to the heavy weapons tab of the shop, spying a laser for 5000. ”What luck”, I thought – but I couldn’t buy it. There was no explanation to the issue, no nothing. Deep Space Anomaly flat out refused to let me buy it.
And this is pretty much the pattern for the game, I’m afraid. Deep Space Anomaly feels unfinished; like the developers cobbled some ideas together and shovelled it out of the door as fast as possible. However I want to make sure I pick my words very carefully here in order to be fair but Deep Space Anomaly, while it runs, has hardly a single discernible good point that I have been able to find. Why do the enemies ram you all the time? How are you supposed to see where you are going and avoid them? What am I doing with my life playing this nonsense?
The only slight redeeming feature is the speed at which it throws Xbox achievements and Gamerscore at you – 100G for starting a level? And yet even this simple pleasure is tempered by the knowledge that you will have to engage on some level to unlock them. And believe me, easy Gamerscore ain’t worth it.
Sadly, I can’t really go much lower on the final score for Deep Space Anomaly, no matter how tempting it is for the soundtrack alone, but take my word for it – I have played this so you don’t have to. Not all heroes wear capes…
Deep Space Anomaly is on the Xbox Store
