Space Shells Preview

Space Shells is a roguelite VR title in which you'll take control of an android mercenary to destroy others and hijack their spaceships.

This Early Access title is in the very early stages of development, and it shows — currently, about two hours of playtime will allow you to see everything the game has to offer. Starting off, you'll play through a quick tutorial that teaches you the basics, including how to grab objects, interact with them, open doors, and open chests. This brief tutorial helps get you up to speed with game mechanics and does a good job at not overwhelming you with information, though I do hope that future updates will integrate a couple of extra tutorials on how to manage weapon and shell upgrades for your character (more on that later).

 

You'll use typical VR controls to play through the game, though Space Shells is not for those that get motion sickness easily — with no teleportation option for locomotion, you'll need to use your joystick to walk around, which can be very dizzying, especially when running. You'll need to crouch to hide from enemies and push your right analogue stick forward to jump. That said, not all movement was fluid, as the game wasn't able to register my height properly and, for some strange reason, thought I was constantly crouching. Trying to adjust this in the settings, restarting the game, and even recalibrating Steam VR failed to fix this issue, meaning that I — at 154cm tall — struggled to reach some items and was constantly pushed by my in-game knees from hugging walls. 

Bug-wise, both technical and visual, Space Shells is mostly perfect — aside from not being able to stand up and the game thinking I'm constantly crouching (which somehow worked to my benefit for cover in the long run), I did find that loading screens would bump me back into Steam VR and the game would rarely mess up my calibration, thinking the centre of the room was far away.

 

Currently, you'll be able to explore three different mission difficulties — EASY, MEDIUM, and HARD. The only differences between these three are the adversary level (increasing the number of shots they can take and how much damage they do) and how many enemies you'll find scattered throughout the mission. You'll need to eliminate all of the enemies, starting at a measly four and going to over a dozen, without losing all of your life yourself. Each time you complete a mission, you get credits according to the difficulty and numerous other actions, including dismantling weapons, killing enemies, and opening crates. That said, opening crates was often far more hassle than it was worth, and I opted to ignore them. They'd usually spawn upside down, and you have to hit them from the top a la Kratos to open them, which — with me being constantly crouched — was a borderline Sisyphean task.

The roguelite elements come into play in the form of upgradeable equipment, of which you can get numerous upgrades for two shells, which are the bodies of the robot, and two unlockable weapons, each with different modifiers and shooting modes. You'll use credits earned through missions to get these, and then you'll be able to apply them by spending credits through "printing" the items. By getting the base ones, it'll be free — accurate for the Justice gun, the starting shell, and the body you can unlock — but the higher-grade items you open and upgrades you give them, the more credits it'll cost to actually manufacture them. The cost was never egregious, which I sincerely appreciate as you won't have to measure how many credits you'll lose in contrast to earning if you enter with a basic weapon.

 

The more upgrades you have and slot into, the more credits these items cost, but you'll also be able to enter MEDIUM and HARD quests, where foes take way more hits and can deal high amounts of damage. That said, whilst having basic equipment (mostly because I'd unlocked a bunch of things for my Justice gun that didn't know I had to modify and print like that until later on) I did manage to complete a MEDIUM mission after failing a lot. The quests are easy, and the A.I. doesn't react a whole lot to you, which made the combat feel far more about shooting first and continuously rather than dodging under cover and using items strategically, such as the EMP grenade that I loved to use but barely got to due to the chest opening system.

Environmental objects allow you to try to strategically engage in combat, but haphazard item reactions (with the combustible objects flying around) made it difficult to rely on this properly, boiling the combat down to just using your guns to shoot foes and stun lock them rather than trying to use strategic approaches.

 

Tutorials aren't very present in the game, and you'll need to learn how to upgrade things and complete them through trial and error, which I wasn't overly fond of when I was failing to figure out what an item did until I ultimately gave up on using it.

All in all, the action sequences feel a bit lacking from the unreactive A.I., making Space Shells newcomer-friendly but likely far too easy for a veteran in the shooting genre. Currently, you'll find a roadmap of plans to add, with numerous items already teased in-game, including various other shells, but currently, Space Shells is just a shell of what it will become with proper love and care.