What? One day of the game in Endless Space 2

Where? Paris, France

In the 19th century, a society of flat land formed in England. Its members up to the two thousandth years seriously believed that the earth was flat and there really was no space, and Gagarin, the Hubble telescope and NASA are all the mystification of the century.

In France, a studio formed in the XXI century Amplitude , whose employees seriously believe that we are not alone in the universe and believe that in space is full of exciting adventures and in general it is ideal for the development of our own transgalactic empire. To find out how all this is implemented in the upcoming 4x strategy Endless Space 2 , We went to visit Amplitude and felt the early build of the game.

And the dawn here is endless

Here is a star map of a huge galaxy with arteries of routes between star systems. All this beauty is perfectly approaching and moving away, allowing in details to consider each studied system and every planet in it.

Beginners in the series and in the genre can first be bad from a bunch of badges and tsiforcors – but in reality, in all information madness, you can figure out about thirty minutes. And for experienced strategists, the developers https://golden-pharaoh-casino.co.uk/ stocked the “gap” button, when you click on which you can see additional data, such as the saturation of trading flows.

In addition to studying space, during the course you can send starships in different directions, engage in the management of your planets, conduct scientific experiments, fight and build diplomatic relations with neighbors.

► distributed instructions to the ships, and now you can engage in the development of the empire.

And all this for the main goal in Endless Space 2, or rather, one of four. As usual in 4 strategies, you can win in several ways: economic, diplomatic, scientific-progressive or simply arranging the good old exterminatus for all neighbors.

Space battles are automatically. You can influence something only before a collision by choosing an attacking maneuver for your starships. And then the ships will begin to shoot at each other with lasers and missiles without the participation of the player.

In the first stages, while a couple of flimsy longboats will fight, you can skip videos with battles, there is nothing to look at. But when you have a whole flotilla (according to the developers, up to twenty ships on each side will participate in the battles), hung with blasters and torpedoes, you will see the battles in the best traditions of science fiction cinema.

► the larger the flotilla, the more interesting it is to observe cosmic battles.

Citizens of the Galaxy

In Endless Space 2, the passage style is largely determined by the selected race, and there will be at least eight in the final version. And yes, this is decisively not the case when one fraction has blue ships, and the other has square, and the differences ended on this. In the first part of Sophon technocrats, the parliament is occupied by pacifists, and this is a bad help for aggressive expansion of space. Although it is not so difficult to turn sophons into militant invaders over time – Endless Space 2 will provide wide freedom of action, including in terms of influence on party policy.

► This is something like this is the representatives of the Vodyani race. Terrible guys, you can’t say anything.

In addition to several races from the original game, newcomers will also settle in the sequel, including Vodyani. The name, by the way, was taken from Slavic culture, the developers themselves admitted this. However, Vodyani does not smell like any amphibians. On the contrary, these are religious high-tech ghouls, sucking out star systems, instead of doing some kind of boring colonization there, like other races. And play for them, respectively, will be completely different.

Houston, we have problems

To build an empire will be ahead of literally a brick. At first you have only one star system with a single -lived planet and a pair of flimsy starships in orbit. And if, reaching the nearest star system, they will not stumble upon a giant and not very friendly empire – consider that you are very lucky.

However, with the same success, you can find modest possessions of the so -called secondary races. They do not compete with the player, but they can make dirty tricks if they do not appeal them with bribes or not assimilate. At the same time, by the way, expanding its empire due to their territories.

► Play past the planets-there is something interesting on everyone.

The farther into space, the higher the chance to stumble upon an uninhabited system, in which the planet is suitable for life and resource -rich resources. Then quickly erect outpost on it – after a dozen and a half he will turn into a colony and begin to bring resources, as well as supply starships and participate in the life of the empire.

But you have to hold the ear in vast: some zealous neighbor can build a colony on a neighboring planet faster. Then the star system will be considered his property, and it seems that you can’t get off with diplomacy here.

Such tricks should be expected from another new race – Lumeri. These guys are already amphibians, and skillful dealers. While you are slowly swarming with outposts, they can simply buy the entire stellar system. And then, if you ask a lot, they will resell it. Wedding.

We dream not only the rumble of the cosmodrome

If lifeless stones rotate in the discovered star system around the luminaries, this does not mean that it is time to drive the reconnaissance starship further. Each planet has several zones for study. Having sent a probe from a research ship there, you can find a cache of an ancient race, a one-time bonus in some kind of resources or a radioactive anomaly-here is how lucky.

Here are just such zones in the system can be with a dozen, and there are only two probes on board and several moves are spent on their renewal. I have to choose: to make a mistake in orbit to explore all zones, or fly further to the unknown.

► sometimes Endless Space 2 is fascinating.

Brezda's endless spaces of the cosmos in Endless Space 2, you can stumble upon a bunch of accidentally generated locations (for example, an academy where you can train heroes) and quests (find the ancient artifact, do not build military buildings of ten moves or drive there, then there, and then there is still there there).

However, a lot of important happens on your native planet. On it (as well as in developed colonies, which is already there) the whole scientific and political life of the empire proceeds. The Senate meets here, where you can promote the necessary laws: for example, one of them allows you to place more probes on research vessels.

Depending on your actions, a party system is formed – they fought a little, and the support of the militaristic party has increased by the population. You, in turn, can provide one or another parties with support in the elections, which opens access to new useful bills.

► The fewer military operations the empire conducts, the more pacifists in the Senate.

Unlike the political system, scientific research does not require the will of the people, but it will have to be spent resources and time. Technologies are grouped for its intended purpose – military, industrial and others – and divided into four eras. Access to the next opens no earlier than you conduct a certain amount of research in the previous.

Unlike scientific and political, secular life on your planets is much more modest, but from this less important does not become. Not only representatives of your race live on each planet, but also secondary races.

The number of residents is measured in units of the population: each brings one or another type of resources for the course. At the same time, all nationalities have their own bonuses – for example, in the extraction of fossils. So it is worth arranging mass deportations under the guise of optimization of industry or the fight against overpopulation.

* * *

Endless Space 2 test builded contained only four races, cut game options and a sea of ​​bugs, but nevertheless the game left more than pleasant impressions – thanks to a deep variable gameplay with wide freedom of action in addition to the most beautiful design in the genre.

In a word, Endless Space 2 will delight lovers of 4x strategies and fans of space science fiction, as well as, possibly, members of the Society of Flat Earth. The game should be released in early access very soon-they actually promised on September eight, but it seems that the developers took a timeout for polishing.

Well, probably, it is for the better.

Games like Dead Space -The real curse of journalists: like any large pop product, it is very easy to scold them, but it is even more difficult to get rid of them. With your mind you understand that in front of you is the game analogue of the film " Twilight ": Quite lousy -assembled from scraps of someone else's material and through and through a manipulative product. But each time, pressing a pulsating alien biomass with a wrigue boot, you feel a noisy 15-year-old teenage girl with a bucket of popcorn from the back rows. It can be seen that, despite the lack of talent and good taste, these people looked in childhood exactly the same horror films as you, and now with the greatest care they turn their contents into zeros and units of software code. Almost all the developers of the video game are engaged in rethinking someone else's heritage to a greater or lesser extent, and Dead Space was far from the worst example of such a job. The main problems of the first part lay in a completely different plane – heimdisan: at least once they did not get lost in 15 hours of fermentation along the very same corridors of the Ishimur space station, it seems that no one had anyone. In the sequel, this problem has been successfully solved.

Stranger. Saga. Resurrection

Therefore, if you suddenly have not seen the first part – consider that you have not lost anything. Dead Space 2 – This, if you like, is such an auto -repairing in other decorations and with a large scale. Engineer Isaac Clark, in the first game, completely cut out by necromorphs (cosmic parasites that multiply, killing the victim and instilling in her body), the brown station was slightly damaged by his mind and spent the last three years in a native shirt, peacefully letting down and talking with his dead girlfriend Nicole. During the next psychotherapy session, nightmares become more persistent, and reality is increasingly distinguishable from nightmares: Isaac shakes an unknown person and, riveting about a terrible danger, dies from the clutches. The hero (still continuing to remain in a nationwide shirt) barely manages to escape, finds the good old plasma cutter and continues the work begun in the first part.

The first levels of Dead Space 2 are even too similar to her: Isaac paces in an engineering costume of the future, selflessly divides the already familiar necromorphs, curses from a lack of light and searches every dark corner in search of something useful (cartridges, as always, disastrously lacking). That is, he is engaged exactly the same as in 2008. However, having gone through the first few chapters, somehow you quietly catch yourself thinking that playing still did not bother.

At first it is completely incomprehensible how and why this is happening. The basis of the game remained the same: we wander around at times the increased space station, once every few minutes we stumble upon a script that trimmed the next group of monsters on our heads, choose the one who is closer and cut off all the protruding parts of the body.

“Strategic dismemberment” still does not allow to shred the monster at any angle: each necromorph has only a few pre-set “cut lines”. Home in the body will not cause him special troubles – in order to get rid of danger, you need to amputate all the limbs with surgical accuracy. Only time for this, sorry for the pun, usually revers: even ordinary enemies are very fast, and if you cut off the necromorph of the legs in time, it will not be able to move quickly and will become almost harmless. However, some in such cases begin to spit with acid, so if the distance allows, then it is better to immediately cut off the necromorph of the head until he sprayed you from the head to the top. Some enemies require an extremely careful attitude to themselves: you just have to touch the stomach of the swollen necromorph, as small and extremely annoying larvae will definitely climb out of it. Fit with explosive parts of the body are found even more often – it is better to immediately run away from such a safe distance, and only then aim.

And on Venus is now summer ..

In Dead Space 2, all the terrible things through which the player passes in the middle of the XXII century. Humanity has long moved into space and has successfully lives in colonies throughout the solar system and even beyond. Everything is logical: if you do not break out of the "parental house", nothing good is waiting for nothing good. Fortunately, in the real world, this is also perfectly understood and slowly begin to think about expansion into space. Let's see what awaits us in Seven Casino the future.

And why does humanity need this at all-to fly somewhere, solve a bunch of problems, survive in the new conditions? If you now thought about the beauty of the cosmos, romantic travel and drinking Bordeaux in an embrace with aliens – leave this youthful maximalism. No reasonable (and unreasonable) politician, scientist or economist will approve of such squandering funds and efforts.

Agree, any person at least once dreamed of flights to other planets. It seems to us that this is such a protective natural mechanism for survival, because without this desire of people there is a relatively fast (on cosmic scale) death.

What can happen? The most banal is the collision of an asteroid with the ground. If a pebble arrives with a diameter of only 300 meters, a large city like Moscow or New York can be erased into the dust. This, of course, is unpleasant, but in general for humanity is not fatal. But if there is more than 10-15 kilometers in the area of ​​the sky in the sky … They saw the film "Armageddon" Michael Bay? So, all this is nonsense, no Bruce Willis will save us. When a block at a speed of 50,000 km/h will meet with the ground, energy equal to the explosions of thousands of atomic bombs will be released. And this is no longer a science fiction – precedents happen to about every 100 million years. Presumably, the last time it bucked 65 million years ago, and even the dinosaurs did not find the right Bruce Willis.

But the resources will end much faster on Earth to meet the needs of a person. The energy crisis can drive into space much stronger than some asteroid there. There are already options. Remember what spaceships work at Mass Effect. And what did Sam Rockwell get in the film "Luna 2112"? Heliy-3 isotope is also not science fiction, but quite real fuel of the future. When people learn to control the thermonuclear reaction (see. ITER project), helium-3 is very useful. There is almost no it on Earth: for a million dollars you can buy only a kilogram. But on the moon – millions of tone. They just lie there. According to scientists, to satisfy all the energy needs of earthlings during the year, only 30 tons are needed. At the same time, there are no radioactive waste from a thermonuclear reaction, so the method is environmentally friendly (if only it doesn’t tear, by itself). So the colony on the moon is a practical thing. The first flights will start in the area of ​​2020. At the same time, humanity will be able to conduct more effective astronomical observations on the moon, extract other minerals and generally continue to study space in every possible way.

Of course, you will have to solve many problems (radiation, small asteroids, life support), but the best minds also work on these problems. The most radical way to solve them is terraforming. It is not too profitable to turn the moon into a inhabited paradise, but humanity licks in Venus for a long time – to fly not far (closer than to Mars), gravity is almost identical to the earth, the atmosphere is. True, it consists of carbon dioxide, and the pressure is 30 times larger than the earth, and the temperature is almost 500 degrees on the surface, but all these little things can be solved by terraforming.

Firstly, you will have to send a few algae to Venus, which would hang out at an altitude of 50-60 kilometers (temperature +30 degrees) and converted carbon dioxide into oxygen. No need: there will be no enemies of algae, because they will multiply very quickly. All this will reduce the temperature on the surface to 100 degrees and pressure to 10 atmospheres, which is not so bad. Then Venus will need to be closed from the sun with a special screen, bring water, dropping several ice asteroids, wrap the cable along the equator and let the current on it to create a protective magnetic field. Then it remains to lower the cat (for happiness), and that’s all, you can settled. In the best case, the average temperature on Venus will stay at 26 degrees. You will get a very cute resort planet.

Isaac Clark and Death Gifts

Over time, the differences from the first part become noticeable. Firstly, the picture has become much better: details have grown, much more physically correct objects have been scattered through the corridors and rooms, the game of light and shadow looks even more realistic and worse, and there were no equal ones in terms of the sound of Dead Space. To write down so frightening and reliable moans, rumble, sinister gurgling and creak of claws for metal, you need to be not only real fans of your business, but, perhaps, have very strong stomachs.

The second important change that you notice very quickly is many times an increased number of zones with zero gravity, where now, moreover, you can move freely in any direction. Previously, freedom of displacements was limited by automatic jumps between two planes, and now small jet engines have been built into the costume, with which Isaac has learned to fly no worse than an iron person.

Large open spaces demanded a more long -range weapon: a sniper rifle and a gun shooting spears appeared in the sequel. And the kinesis, which allows you to move objects in space, has become really useful for once: now they can not only pull up packages of cartridges to itself, but also tear off the blade from the dead necromorph and throw it into a still living fortune. Stasis, shortening the enemies and objects for a short time, migrated into the sequel unchanged; without it, it is almost impossible to deal with a large company of aggressively tuned reptiles.

Three new types of mutants appeared: crawling babies who explode when they hit, crowds of bloodthirsty kindergartens with blades, as if coming from the first Silent Hill , And the necromorph, which at the sight of Isaac first runs away and hides, and then with a terrible howl of the hero lies his forehead. By the way, useful items are now falling out of dead enemies not immediately, but only after a good kick with a hand -made boot.

He is talking!

As you can see, they have not cooked new content so much. But over the past time from the moment the first part exits Visceral Games They did a lot. First of all, we dismantled the poorly working mechanism into the components, carefully lured its details, smeared everything that creaks, and all the unnecessary cut out.

In Dead Space 2, everything that catastrophically lacked the original appeared to become an excellent game. First, the changes affected the scenery that got rid of self-digging. The corridors on which Isaac walks are literally shut up by hand and with the greatest attention to the details – the old feeling that you were already here, during the entire passage of the sequel, never arises. And due to the fact that the action was transferred from a cramped drill platform to a huge city-colony, the long-awaited scale appeared. Having run away from the hospital, you immediately get to the residential quarter with its shops and residential buildings. Tired of listening to heartbreaking cries from locked apartments? Welcome to the primary school of the future, where the game at once resembles Silent Hill and F.E.A.R. 2. Burned cubes, cars, plush stars and chopped boards stained with blood? Visit a very beautiful and gloomy church of unitology, which, together with the government, plays the role of universal evil. And so to the very end.

Secondly, the game situations themselves have become much more diverse. The script no longer consists of phrases “Isaac fights with a monster” and “Isaac meets a crazy scientist”. At each level there is a moment when the game includes Hollywood and dilutes a slow horror with some adrenaline attraction. At one of these moments, Isaac decides to catch up with the metro car off the tunnel on his reactive accelerators, from which doors and other garbage from time to time come off (the whole scene is quite interactive). And how not to get a break in heart gap, when mutating kids in huge, completely atypical numbers for DEAD Space are first climbed from church stained glass windows?

After such scenes, a meditation session with a flight in outdoor space for calibration of solar batteries or the solution of some not very difficult puzzle occurs. And, which is important, not one of such situations is repeated twice than the first Dead Space loved to sin very much. It is nice to see that the developers had enough self -irony to laugh at their mistakes: the game again has the moment when Isaac has enough giant tentacles by the leg and tries to pull in ventilation, only this scene ends quite unexpectedly.

And finally, Dead Space 2 turned out to be even more a cinematic game than before. Now this is no longer a glued set of quotes from all important space horror searches of the last thirty years, and a completely independent work “On the topic”. The plot is really interesting to follow, and Isaac is no longer shy about his face, regularly removes the helmet and even says that it was difficult to imagine in the original. Non -banal secondary characters appeared around that grow and develop during the narrative. The virtual operator went through advanced training courses, learned to build a frame and add where the speakers needed. And the scriptwriters finally realized that once from sending a player to repair a broken generator-poor motivation for passing, and added to everything that happens in a scope.

* * *

In a word, colossal work on mistakes has been done – from the space clone Resident Evil 4 With a couple of interesting ideas, the game has turned into the best Body-Horror of our day, a real game version of a “stranger” from a third person. In this sense, the game repeats the path Assassin’s Creed , The first part of which only laid the foundations of basic mechanics, and the real game appeared only starting with the second. EA on Dead Space 2, as you know, will not stop either.

Reigracy – No

Cool plot – Yes

Originality – No

Easy to master – Yes

Evidence of expectations: 90 %

Gameplay: 9

Graphics: 8

Sound and music: 9

Interface and management: 8

Waited?

The best (and only) cosmic horror of our days, who is operating approximately the same techniques as the authors of the “stranger” in 1979: more disgust and alien mucus, and the audience will somehow come up with meanings.

Mania rating: 9.0

"Great"