20 Years After Freelancer, A Dev Is Reviving Its Roleplaying Legacy - Underspace

what's up guys and gals and welcome back to the nerd Castle today in the world of Indie Games we're going to be taking a look at a title called underspace this is one of those games that I think is very very interesting because it's one of the few games to actually try to tackle the legacy of freelancer and kind of like a one for one way if you don't know what freelancer is freelancer is one of the older titles now 20 years ago that was made by Chris Roberts the guy that's now working on Star Citizen is the thing that he worked on after Wing Commander which is the game that made him famous and so freelancer is kind of a very important game when it comes to the history of gaming because it's one of those space flight Sims that you can feel its design decisions and you can sort of feel its importance in the industry to this day dollars to Donuts if you have a favorite space game that favorite space game was probably made by somebody that thinks the world of freelancer and so to actually see a game like underspace that's actually trying to be freelancer in a lot of ways visually and design wise is kind of a cool thing 20 years later there's not a lot of games out there that have actually tried to be a direct homage to it rather a lot of games have taken influence from it but haven't really taken visual stylings or anything else from it and so today we're going to be taking a look at underspace this is a title where the developer fired over a copy of the game early the game is slated right now for like a q1 or a Q2 release here in 2024 I can't really tell you too much more than that though unfortunately the release date is kind of up in the air and I've heard like different things from different sources so we'll just have to wait and see the fact of the matter is though we're going to be taking a look at under face today I think for about 30 minutes we're going to see if it's something that suits your fancy we're going to see if it's a game that you want to check out and add to your inventory and so if after watching this you enjoyed the video you will find that I've got a link for you down below in the description you can check that out there and then of course you'll also find a link to my Discord and my twitch stream just in case you wanted to hang out live every single day of the week so what is freelancer what is under space why does it matter well freelancer is a very famous open world space sandbox that was made by Chris Roberts the guy that's now working on Star Citizen and also made Wing commander and it's one of those games that you can feel the influence of all throughout space sims to this day there is no space game out there hey we got him very very nice that guy was really giving us a run for our money man that guy was running circles around me but anyways freelancer is one of those games that's very important in game development history it's one of those titles that people have always been fascinated with because it was kind of the first of its breed and underspace I think is also going to interest people because it's one of the first games to try to chase that down I think aesthetically and Visually uh this is very much a game that wants to be a game from the early 2000s it definitely looks like one of those games that you would have needed an old Voodoo graphics card or something to play around with but it also steps into its own identity I think in a good way under space is a title that visually and kind of aesthetically and gameplay-wise wants to be a lot like freelancer but it also has its own identity behind the curtain by integrating a lot of lovecraftian elements I think into a space Sim which is kind of a weird thing that no one is expecting out there but ultimately this is a game where you are a disgraced nobleman you used to have a trade Fleet used to have a bunch of rad stuff going on for you unfortunately through a sequence of events you have been disgraced and through the grace of a friend who has cleared out basically the criminal or not even the criminal I guess the shame that's on your name you've got one star fighter left in your entire fleet and now it's your responsibility to go back out and rebuild your life despite the fact that you don't really have anything left by taking random jobs delivering packages consorting with I guess dubious people in space and also getting involved in Galactic Intrigue to try to get yourself all patched up and get your finances back in order looks like we've been drawn into another fight here unfortunately uh the meters on screen that you can see right now the yellow for me is energy the blue meter in between that is going to be our Shields it is unfortunately very very depleted uh We've also got a red meter down there which is our hole when that goes down to zero unfortunately poof you are now dead but it looks like we're doing a pretty good job putting the heat on the enemy right now they're going to be a lot more agile than we are and that's due to the fact that I'm flying a heavy fighter which is a class a vehicle that turns a little bit slower like the wheel radius on it isn't going to be quite as good but it does pack a punch it has a lot more weapon slots so when it finally brings that to bear on you you're going to feel it now we do have an advantage in this fight hey there we go we do have an advantage in this fight because while the enemy is very agile and they're able to spin around us very easily we have the ability to fix our Hull on the Fly and also fix our shields on the Fly we've actually been getting hit quite a bit on the opening to this video I wasn't exactly expecting this much action this is like the third or the fourth time I've tried to record this and then I just end up moving cargo around the entire time because nothing interesting and action-packed is happening uh all of your play styles that you expect here from other games I think are intended to be implemented even if they are not as of right now I have seen the first inklings of a crafting system as I've been following the storyline I've noticed that there seems to be some kind of reference to salvaging and some of the equipments that's inside some of the dry docks it looks like you do have the ability to move cargo around just in case you want to do some space Trucking and you don't really care about the laser knuckle experience of surviving as a mercenary in space it does appear to me as though especially since I've bought ships already in my last couple hours of playing the game there were Freighters listed inside the ships that I was able to buy so on opening and also cursory analysis it seems like oh they're not going to let me go through the gate over is this the gate that's like at the edge of the system right here well let's take a look at this world map right here and find out so I don't know if this is like all that there currently is inside the current build uh this goes to gria right here this entire 2 or three hour period I've been cruising around this area just doing missions and there's sort of like this or that that you can play around with however there's a System Map There's a Galaxy map that you can see right here and honestly I have no clue where we are inside the context of this little area over here I think we're right there in the top leftand Corner in VRI but there's also a un oh God am I being shot at I am being shot at oh my God okay yep hated that why am I being shot at right now what did I do to you boys I don't think I did anything to you all right let's go ahead and bring her around then see if we can get something going at least the police responded which is good I wasn't even looking so I was unaware of the fact that I was under attack go ahead and turn on my auto turret well I'm trying to turn on my auto turret s there we go turn on my auto turret right there I didn't realize that I was in fast mode all right where's he guys at there he is over there so he's jamming oh he's already dead dude yeah that's what I'm talking about Johnny Law on the spot man while I was trying to figure out what was going on with my controls I think we're all good here why is my energy draining right now oh it's because my Auto turret's on gotcha I have an auto turret it's pretty sick so we got some hole webbing over there I could take that I'm out of missiles though I think we're going to have to resupply before I go out to whatever this mission is give me just a minute we'll go resupply real fast I got to buy some more missiles and and then we can come back on out here and we can actually throw down with whoever this target is he's got a lot more homies than I thought he was going to have man all right so we got docking permission back where we were trying to actually get resupplied at real quick I wasn't expecting to fire 75 missiles in between here and where we're going but one thing I do like about this game is that it has manual docking Bays so like when you pull up to a station you actually have have to look for the spot that it wants you to dock inside of you got to find your parking which is pretty cool so this is where we would restock or resupply our ship I already went and took care of everything but if you wanted to see how customizable your ship is they have kind of this weird menu over here on the left that has different categories for different things that you can equip I would definitely prefer to have basically like a layout of the ship right here and have like different slots you could click and drag things into I think that's just by far a much much more Superior system than sort of like little console lists like this but maybe this is kind of just like a a placeholder for what they're planning on doing later I honestly have no clue but this might look like a jumble of confusion over here but this is essentially all the weapons all the subsystems all of the equipment and everything else I have on my ship right now it's a little bit limited for where I am in the game at the moment there's like a couple of tiers of different weapons and things that we can equip but by and large it it definitely feels like we're kind of like in the Newbie starter area there hasn't been anything too wild and crazy when you go to the ship dealer for example like you would find right here uh you can take a look at all the different ships and things that they have for I have no idea why they made this prominade so large so that it takes you so long to get to the ship vendor guy I have no clue but as of right now there's a couple of different ships that are available for your perusal and purchase just in case you wanted to play around with them light medium heavy fighter and a Freer I don't know if there's more than that further on into the testing area I don't know there's always like this conflict with the content that I make where I've got to sort of balance between playing the game for a couple hours so that I know what you actually can and cannot do inside of the game to do an Impressions video or at the same time also trying to constantly figure out have I played the game a little bit too much and is this now actually like a formalized review those are always the issues that you run into if you don't want to get attacked in this game stay away from these trade Lanes these little trade Windows right here uh these guys are the fundamental cause of like every jump and attack that you will ever be jumped and or attacked by if you just cruise around space normally no one bothers you nobody cares but I swear to God every time I use these jump Gates I get attacked by like 30 guys just trying to go down the street Law and Order is apparently not a huge Focus for Space Age future Society they don't really care about I don't know law I mean the cops do show up I guess maybe it's just that this place is so crappy and Lawless that there's really no way around it you're going to have some kind of smoke with somebody everywhere you go so after coming back down the trade Lane again I was absolutely correct I got attacked by like 50 more guys coming on through here the good news is they're all super slow and they can't catch me so it looks like our mission Waypoint is about 40 clicks out this way just randomly in space one thing I do like about this game is that it's not on Rails like all of these areas you can actively interact with oh we flew into a nit nebula that's not super great so did I mention that this game is like what if freelancer was also inspired by Lovecraft so here's the thing about this title there are these things called nebulas that you're occasionally going to fly through and nothing good happens once you go into the nebula uh it's all giant tentacle monsters it's all kinds of hentti diddling it's just bad news for everybody what we're trying to hunt is that Rift right there if we can kill that Rift I think it shuts down the actual nebula I don't know if there's a whole bunch of these inside of here but it may be faster to sort of like interact with this thing over here and see if we can't knock it out of the sky I know we get some kind of rare loot that you don't get otherwise if you mess with a rift but other than that I can't really tell you too much more I think I've only ever really like shot it up with one of them we also can't use our Abyss drive when we're inside the rift so unfortunately this the speed that we're going at right now is as fast as you can possibly go inside of an actual uh warp storm so I'm going to head on over there there's going to be an edit right here but I'm going to hope that the Gill feel holds and that we don't end up with eyeballs growing out of bulkheads and having our legs pulled from our body and terrible things being done to our Remains by the likes of the chaos Gods so after a good long while of slow boating we're actually pulling up on top of this thing right here these storms come in different categories this is just a cat one so it shouldn't be too bad to deal with and take out the rift that spawns this entire warp storm but they do go up much higher I went into a category 3 a little while ago and it got pretty mayhem out it definitely got complicated uh where is the rift right there yeah I kind of need that Rift to be tracked oh it's not letting me lock it there we go now I've got it hold on we need to go wait there's an unknown wreck over here it's inside the unknown wreck I don't think I've seen an unknown wreck inside this environment before wonder if there's like loot or something going on over there the rift has also got to be around I mean we can deal with that in a minute but hold on let's check out this wreck that's in the middle of the storm maybe there'll be something recoverable that we can take back with us to make like a little bit of scratch the ghost of the vsss harrowing nope can't say that I like that okay we'll turn on my autoc Cannon here oh my goodness gracious what are you uh you are horrifying whatever you are I don't like you very much okay yep we're probably going to want to stay a little bit wide they're busting quite a few shots at us right now maybe see if I can fire a few rounds back maybe yeah that's a pretty big lky clunky ship man oh we've been hit it feels so stingy luckily our Shields have come back up I wonder if this guy counts as the rift it's sort of hard to say like normally what happens with these storms is that you get to a spot and there's like a crack in reality and you got to shoot it a couple times and then it seals back up and everything is okay this is entirely new and something that I haven't seen before so I don't know exactly what's happening here I'm just going to stay moving and hope that this works out oh God okay yep that was an explosion o oh a storm ey cool uh so the storm ey is kind of like the ultimate loot that you get out of these places when you do weird little random events uh I think is there any loot around not really but the rift is over here we're going to have to seal that up though before we can leave this area there's just no nothing we can really do about it I keep getting sidet track from my missions man I had to do that without missiles too because unfortunately my keys were messed up I swapped out some equipment all right I swapped out some equipment now here I am hopefully the storm I is worth some money or something dude I'm like filthy broke right now I can't even afford to fix my Hull at the moment that's how bad it is all right we're coming up on this thing let's see if we can lock it down and seal it and get the storm out of the way do a little bit of service for the public sector here pretty much everybody will be happy with us if we eliminate this thing that's it right there I don't know how much closer I got to be in order to bust it up but there we go I'm taking on starer hey we got another storm ey too unfortunately it looks like we uh made a couple friends here that are going to come attack us now the second we get done with this impending crisis so I'm just going to hit the road and we're going to turn the Jets on about as high as we can and then we're going to get the abyss drive going too we're going to have to outrun them that's pretty much all there is to it I need to get this Mission done so that I can get a paycheck so that I can actually fix this crusty boat because this thing is doing terrible right now Mission way Point's coming up downside is if we die right here inside of this like so if we arrive so there's a Minefield fabricator I it's been so long since I took this Mission and there's been so many little sub objectives we've run into that unfortunately I don't even recall what I was actively up to at any given time here uh yeah we got a lot of guys shooting at us right now let's go ahead and turn on the auto cannons right there I Choose You you yeah you're my guy see if I can Dash around in front of him here for just a second it doesn't seem like they hit that hard oh boy we taking hits all right give him the missiles let him have it oh is that a flak field oh my God they put down a flak field what a bunch of douchebags okay uh yeah that's definitely inside the realm of problematic not in love with what just happened right there yeah let's just light him up real fast with the rapid fire rocket launcher I was kind of hoping one of them would drop something here because they frequently drop health potions and things my Shields are still up so it looks like the flak field penetrates Shields which is all kinds of a problem inside combat you do have a dash you can see me performing it right there if you ever played a game called chorus it feels a lot like that I don't know if you ever played chorus though all right down he goes give me that we got a shield cache that's not exactly what I'm looking for so we have an unstable refabric around here is that what those two are hold on let's go grab the two loots that are over on this side because they might be repairs or something I still need to destroy the Minefield and I don't know if the Minefield was what laid down that Flack over there uh so we've got a academic launcher right there an unstable refabric I don't think that was our guy so I think we got to get back in here and unfortunately I can't see super well I don't have any missiles left well I got 12 missiles left but if that's the thing that laid down the flak field that's a big problem because we do not have the health right now to soak another flat field or flak field I'll tell you that right this second yeah it definitely looks like it's producing something what it's producing probably mines would be my guess uh we are damaging the thing now so that's good I guess we'll just sit on top of it okay there's our guy right there we completed the mission and we got 20K we look terrible though I mean 20 20 minutes of footage later uh we're not we're not feeling super great we definitely have kind of like a you know an extraterrestrial tummy ache right now let's head on back to station I was not expecting this to be that big of an ordeal but then again when they said to knock out a space station you know what I mean I probably should have considered that maybe it was going to get a little bit hairy uh nobody make fun of my my flammability right now I know that I'm very very flammable and I look awful but we need to oh my God we got to get back to the you see those planets way off in the distance dude I've got to travel for so long and if we get interdicted like one time I'm toast like I'm like actually done for because we're so beat up right now and you want to know the kicker the game doesn't save except for when you dock with stations so all of those storm eyes and all those goodies that we picked up and all the money that we just made if I get interdicted at any point during this adventure we're hosed you can play this game by the way if you desire to do so it's not going to be none too pretty as of right now but you can fly from the cockpit unfortunately the flame effects that are on your cra uh when you've been damaged so much they probably need to be toned down a little bit because they do block visibility pretty aggressively with their flashing while you're just zooming around and so maybe having them draw outwards towards the edge of the screen or something else like that I don't really know I'm not sure how to rework that right there but either way the flashing is getting really annoying maybe make it stop being Flames once you've been out of combat for a little while and then just have it throw Sparks or like a little bit of smoke every now and again with kind of like a thing going on you know what I mean either way we're going to go back to the shipyard everything's going to be okay I just know it we made it back to port in one piece uh there are numerous ports inside the system as of right now that I've been able to interact with they will have varying services and things that you can do they do have people standing around who have little conversations with one another which I think is pretty immersive one thing I like very much about this game is that the aliens look like aliens so I don't know how many cyer games you've played but I've always hated it when things are like Star Trek or things are like Star Wars where everything is bipedal and it's just like from the waist up there weird what I like about this universe that right there is an alien it's just a energy Cube that's on top of this mounting thing right here and they totally float around and talk to you and they're just like normal people but they're weird conceptually they have like that Jack Kirby vibe to them and I've always felt like when it comes to alien that Jack Kirby Vibe is very very important I will probably just rearm and repair I guess did that refill okay that refilled my ammunition now we got to go find ourselves another job they haven't offered me the next story line tidbit yet I don't know if and when that's going to come through or if it's even going to come through at all I have my mission log up here I don't know how much of the main campaign actually exists I've done three main quests right now and it probably took 40 minutes to do all of them aside from that I've just been doing randomized missions and getting my ship more and more kitted up my guess is that so your character does level up right now I don't know if the character customization is necessarily completed yet or ready to go not super sure on that front uh but there's basically four different categories you put points into whenever you level up and so I actually kind of feel like Shield charge rate would be a good idea here I've been noticing that it takes a really really long time for my Shields to recharge but I'm hoping the RPG aspects of this game are one of those things that have a pinp put in them and those are going to be expanded out like wildly more more impressively you know along the the lines of something like Star sector is what I expect from a modern space game and I don't care if it takes a while to get there inside the context of Early Access but star sector is more or less what every single G of this genre should be aiming for at this point you should like one for one compare the way your game handles this system to the way that star sector handles it and if it doesn't handle it in that way or up to that requisite quality well guess what just do the thing just do the thing that star sector is doing we've got some wreckage surveys out here yeah I think we could probably do a wreckage survey sometimes these wreckage surveys don't show up the way that I want them to but we definitely need the money another thing is that you can only take one Mission at a time I don't know why it's like that for some reason you can only take one Mission at a time even if they're going to like similar areas like if you have a couple deliveries that are all going to the same area you can only take one of them that also needs to like change uh so what are we looking at right here the orange Mark is usually where we're trying to go to it's probably sending me to a jump gate would be my guess uh this fighter right here I've been really happy with it it's not very agile though this fighter is a heavy fighter which means that it can take a licking but the problem is that it tends to get looped really hard by enemy craft you've no doubt noticed when we were in gunfights that they turn way Tighter and way more effortlessly and they're more agile than we are yep way more agile because we're basically one step above a fighter and one step below a gunship in this craft so you know gunships are considerably oh we got friends huh all right let's go if we got drama to take care of let's go oh my goodness gracious all right what's up guys how we doing we firing some lasers okay let me see if I can get a lock on him there hey I got my lock all right so now we just keep it on the Little Red Dot we make some friends over here oh we probably got him pretty good right there there we go hit him with the missiles let him have it down he goes I don't know if he dropped any loot he was an elite so he should drop loot yeah he dropped an all-in-one repair kit nice where's his little homeboy at where you at brou Hami neba okay ow where did my Shields go did he do that why did my Shields go down strange did I run into something on accident having trouble telling either way he's fighting the cops now so he's got bigger issues than us the cops in this game are legit as hell like the cops will legit light you up in this game uh it's kind of like being in a high security system in Eve online like don't mess with the cops in this game they just kind of win does he have some kind of jamming apparat oh I'm hitting my own missiles with my lasers interesting there we go you didn't drop anything how you going to die without dropping any loot dude that's just Bad Manners I think we want to go to Braven star Spire right now is where we're trying to go man they're sending me out to the middle of nowhere dude they got me sent on out to the ass end of the Galaxy for whatever this wreckage recovery is no wonder they didn't want to send their own guys I've been through like eight jump Gates now dude I've been through it must have been on the absolute opposite side of the system because I have been going through jump Gates like crazy I've been fighting Pirates non-stop these jump Gates dude you just need to like sit cops on them 24 hours a day we need to like reallocate some budgets or something dude we need to give the boys and blue some more money to vaporize some more of these random cultist nerds out here in space luckily most of the Pirates seem to be pretty slow so they're not really that big of a problem so long as you can actually get this thing fired up oh that's actually not that far yeah it's only like 10 km away I may actually have to deal with these Pirates we may have no choice oh no they lost us all right so once we're inside this debris field what we need to do now is we kind of just need to locate these crates for whatever reason the crates don't really have an outline or anything in the way that they work and so you got to kind of just eyeball them or you can come down here to the loot list EV online style and it'll tell you where they're at there's a lot of things in this game that are not super explained but I think that if you've played freelancer I think that if you've played Eve online I think that if you've played any number of of kind of like those space games from which this game draws all of its tropes you'll probably be okay is that one of them right there I had a feeling that was one of them right there good however one of the issues I have run into is that I think sometimes the missions are bugged or they need to be explained a little bit better I've had two or three missions I've had to cancel because it'll be like go out and investigate a thing at the mission marker and then when you get to the mission marker the mission marker is just there and nothing happens it's almost like a quest trigger doesn't go off or something it's either that or there's like another step to the quest that I'm unaware of and I try I read the quest description like 10 times it's there doesn't really say anything inside of there all right so now we need to bring these back I think to ricken was where we got this from I think I don't remember that's another thing if we go to the mission right here and we go to this spot right here it just says return to hascar hascar is a faction in this game every single mission in this game should tell you it's Port of call where it came from it should tell you where the destination is even if it just says see mission location in game uh I have trouble remembering which places I got quests from and that seems like basic information that at this level of technological advancement would just be sort of tracked inside your computers and whatnot still wreckage survey was nice and easy we only got attacked by one or two things on the way out here and none of them were too terrifying so I think I I think I just need to head back to let's take a look at the map actually I think I need to go back to Rick and whatever Rick and Morty station I don't know yeah so far I've enjoyed the game I like what they're playing around with inside of this title I think Nostalgia is doing a lot of the heavy lifting because this is obviously a game that admires the aesthetic of freelancer a lot and freelancer was one of those games that I played quite a bit like my senior year of high school around the time I think that Mech Warrior 4 came out those were probably two of the games that I played quite a bit that summer but I haven't played since so unfortunately I'm not going to be that much help in comparing and contrasting definitely the game is rough around the edges definitely there's going to be things that need to be adjusted and Polished and fiddled with but it seems like the scale of the game they're trying to make appears to be quite large I don't know when it's going to let me out of this system over here and let me start going to other places I also don't know if I should just fly and see if it goes there like if I system outside of the de Mo gotcha okay so that would explain it then I would guess that a lot of the other stuff has then not been added on in so I think that what they've got inside the confines of the game that they're making right now is interesting like I I think that if every single system is as Lively and as visually decorated and whatnot as this one is and they all kind of have their own theme and their own atmosphere and their own story lines it it's clear to me that even though this game is not in Early Access yet it's still early days like were this to come out in Early Access I would say that this is on the earlier end of Early Access I would expect to have a couple of systems in the game at the bare minimum for an early access release so hopefully they have plans to have that in there but by and large the game play has been enjoyable once you get a handle on the sort of esoteric controls I guess that's the other half of it is just this game has a control scheme that is definitely going to have a learning curve before you get used to it with sort of like the space bar making you have a cursor and the game arbitrarily depending on where you came out of Gates or got attacked by Pirates may leave you either in free flight mode or locked mode and then you got to figure it out while taking fire little things like that uh that's all going to be stuff that is going to need to be sorted out as time goes along but by and large I think the game is pretty enjoyable and I think that if you were a fan of freelancer this is definitely one to keep an eye on especially because the lovecraftian influence on the game is sort of an interesting thing that I don't don't think I've ever really seen from a space game before sort of folding in a whole bunch of Lovecraft in there and so I kind of like dig that idea my name is splattercat I sip through the pile to find what's worthwhile in the world of indie games every single day so that you don't have to today up on the chopping block we were fooling around with a little bit of under space which is slated to come out very soon the developers gave me access to kind of like their internal build that you can play around with and I think that the game is pretty en enjoyable once you wrap your head around the controls other than that I guess we'll have to wait a little while we'll have to see how the Early Access goes as to whether or not it fully gets a recommendation as of right now it's a little bit early on to where it would depend on where the price point was at in all honesty uh they've got promising things going on here but it's still pretty early and so I'd want to know what the price point was going to be before I was like yeah D go buy that video game right this second but I will see you all tomorrow with something hot and fresh off that indie Skillet thanks for spending your time with me and that's about all I got for you right now bye folks

Channel: Splattercatgaming

Views: 93,841

Keywords: underspace gameplay, underspace walkthrough, underspace playthrough, lets play underspace, underspace review, underspace preview, underspace impressions, underspace guide, underspace tutorial, underspace download, underspace trailer, underspace music, underspace soundtrack

Id: fuSAj0fWMDs

Length: 33min 9sec (1989 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 03 2024