Osiris: New Dawn Preview

Osiris: New Dawn is an Early Access survival crafting game in which you play as a stranded astronaut on Mars. Or, a planet that looks a lot like Mars, but with decidedly much more flora and fauna of the hostile variety. It's probably exactly what you would expect from a game like this.

The interesting thing about this game is the setting. The survival genre is quite saturated as of late, but Osiris changes it up by taking you off of Earth. Thinking of the possibilities of how this world could have looked, it’s a little sad to see how bland the developers decided to make the environment. Of course, there is fun to be had in the Mars-lookalike by pretending you’re Mark Watney from The Martian. It’s not so barren as Mars, though. Aliens wander this hostile world, huge plants populate the surface, and mysteries lurk underground that I won’t spoil.

Upon crash landing onto this red planet you fix up your suit and collect your scattered resources, and then begin the usual process of collecting enough resources to construct a small shelter From there, it’s all about more collecting and constructing.
The thing is, with most games like this, there are elements of other genres, like horror or adventure, to keep it interesting. Here there isn’t anything like that aside from very lackluster space travel. There are some hints of adventure in the exploration, but not enough to be engaging for any meaningful period of time. Spaceflight can be achieved after the research and building have been done, and while there are plans to include multiple planets and other things to do while out of orbit, there just isn’t much here at the moment when you’re out in the vast expanse of space.

In fact, there isn’t much to do on the surface either. It’s in early access, so this is to be expected. Still, it’s disappointing. There’s really just the crafting, fighting, and quite dull exploring. Nothing special at all. The combat isn’t impressive either. I encountered maybe five different lifeforms, three of which attacked me. Basically, they see me, rush towards me (with terrible AI, I might add) and I would then backstep and shoot. It was the same for every encounter. Hopefully there will be more varied enemies in the full game, but for now, It’s all very bare.

The visuals aren’t anything special on the second highest graphical settings. It doesn’t help that almost everything is a different hue of red. Besides the white and black player-created buildings, the thinly-placed plants scattered throughout the world aren’t interesting, barely breaking the monotony of the constant oranges and reds. The sounds design isn’t particularly interesting, either.

Multiplayer adds to this game, but it isn’t a huge improvement over single player. PvP is exciting for a short period of time, and exploring alongside other players in a PvE server is fun too. It was a bit glitchy though, and I disconnected from multiple servers. I haven’t had the opportunity to play with friends, but I figure that would add some extra enjoyment to the experience, if only for a short amount of time.

Osiris: New Dawn seems on track to end up as an generic survival game. That doesn’t need to be a bad thing if you’re big into that sort of thing, but the last few years have seen many, many similar releases and if Osiris doesn’t do anything different, I don't see any reason to play it over some of it’s other more creative peers. But who knows, it could definitely turn out to be something different, and hopefully better.