Space Siege

Space Siege Has a familiar enough story. Humans colonise another planet, get carried away with the whole idea that they've been given a clean slate to mess up, and plunder its resources to buggery and back. This disturbs a race of peculiarly vindictive insectoids, who slaughter everyone, before chasing them back to Earth and near wiping out the whole lot of us. The hero of Space Siege, Seth, barely gets a chance to complete his tutorial before lie's put into hypersleep. That's why you're naked and unarmed at the beginning of the game. You're not level one, you don't have amnesia, you're just a tough human with sleep in his eyes. How he's going to get even tougher is a matter of urgency, because the situation he wakes up to has all the relentless oppression of Battlestar Galactica (Ron Moore's excellent revamp, not the '80s ultra-camp original) combined with all of the wholesale six-legged slaughter of Starship Troopers.

For the titular semi-sequel to Chris Taylor's previous hit Dungeon Siege, the buzzword that dominates the game's design is "streamlined". This is a word that's both promising and suspicious; in the right hands, streamlining can result in effortlessly intuitive gameplay that's satisfying in its cleverly concealed depth. In the wrong hands, you end up with an experience that is both patronising and unchallenging. Character development is the most obvious area where simplicity has been imposed. Brought cleverly into the sci-fi genre, the upgrade materials that fall from your enemies' bodies replace both currency and experience from Dungeon Siege. Take this accumulated wealth to an upgrade bank and you can turn it into cybernetic upgrades, or have the machinery convert your scrap into useful items, like health packs. This is neat, it fits the canon and if you blur your eyes at the idea of insects shitting out the raw materials for health packs, it's a perfect way of boiling down the labyrinthine skills and requirements of games like WOW.

Control Tweak

The controls have been simplified to fit on a mouse, but you'd be a glutton for punishment if you tried playing one-handed. Guns, grenades, melee combat and special abilities all have to be combined with a more manoeuvrable character than we're used to. Everything apart from melee combat requires you to point at the relevant area, whether it's leaping 5 out of the line of fire or hurling a F grenade into a distant crowd before dispatching the mob around you with an electric shock and a slice of your arm-mounted laser scythe. This feels like the good kind of streamlining - where the efficiency of design lets you fit more in.

One area which may feel lacking in comparison to the fantasy counterpart is your choice of character development. You don't roll a character - you're Seth, and that's that. You get to choose all your upgrades, but there aren't eight branches of magic, just as there aren't eight mutually exclusive branches of made-up science. Seth only really becomes your own once you've taken him some distance in, and refined his abilities to suit your game style.

The limitations of a map is a constraint of all games, but it's never more obvious than in dungeon crawls. At least in Space Siege, you can feel like you're having an impact Ageia Physics allows for (brace yourself) exploding barrels and flying gas canisters. They might be a cliche as well worn as Your Mum jokes, but a destructible room is a room that's more fun to be in. The satisfaction of wiping out a crowd of monsters with a chain barrel reaction hasn't faded since Doom, and I doubt it ever will.

Morality is also touched upon -and not in black and white decisions, but as a question of degree. That is, how much of your human self are you willing to give up to be more powerful? Just the legs? How about a spinal upgrade? And surely I can press you to a mechanical eye, Father? Whereas it's philosophically simplistic to suggest that the essence of humanity lies in not upgrading your kneecaps, it's good to see morality dealt with in a way that's not the infantile kill-or-cuddle dilemma we're becoming used to.

Borg Me Up

You can make yourself 95 per cent metal, but if you want to take the challenging human route, you can upgrade your pet robot, HR-V. The largely autonomous party members and formation tactics of Dungeon Siege have been replaced by a trusty helper robot, which gives him a chance to develop more personality than your typical hired mercenary.

Space Siege plays with a healthy dose of strategy and even a touch of arcade-style skill. In a genre that can be dominated by right-clicking with one hand and drying your nail varnish with the other, Space Siege feels like it's got at least one more string to its bow, and throwing off the fantasy trappings might let us see if the dated dungeon crawl genre actually looks good naked.