by Welcome to ERROR 404 GAME NOT FOUND.
Haha, just kidding. Welcome to Edge of Space.
So, let’s get the dirt out of the way. What is this game? Yes; it is in most ways, a lesser version of Starbound or Terraria. If you’ve played either of those games, then you know what to expect and I won’t waste your time explaining the core concepts. If you haven’t, you should drop what your doing and play either because both are amazing games. That being said, Edge of Space manages to set itself apart from both games in a few ways. Firstly, your avatar is much better equipped right off the bat, possessing a jetpack, a gun and a laser that mines most blocks. Additionally, where Terraria includes obvious aspects of intended base-building and home design (and Starbound even much moreso with its various aesthetically pleasing but functionally useless gadgets that you can pick up everywhere) Edge of Space seems much more concerned with equipping you for PvE. This is not to say that Terraria or Starbound didn’t focus on PvE (far from it) it’s just that if you don’t like murdering wildlife as a primary function of progression, then you might not find this one as appealing.
I can’t speak for much more than the first few hours of the game, but primarily it involved doing quests for a robot laser shark and finding ways to soup up my guns and armor, which is about all I wanted when I jumped in. There are a couple other cool features, most notably the ability to track the specific number of items you need to craft an object (horribly convenient) but otherwise, you’ve got the gist of it. The game is far from perfect, with a couple blaring problems. The visuals are… busy. Especially when you’re above ground and you have to try to pick out your character and the enemies apart from the dozens of bright floating islands in the background. Additionally, while the shadows make the game challenging, it’s a bit frustrating when a couple feet into the ground you immediately can’t see a single thing through the pitch blackness.
So in conclusion, the game isn’t perfect, but is fun–which makes this game a bit of a puzzle to me. So many people seem to hate it. And I mean hate it. Just check out the game reviews and you’ll see a sea of red thumbs down. Why? Validly, this game is apparently unfinished. I personally cannot verify this but it after some brief research, it would appear that certain items in the game that exist in code are not actually obtainable within the game itself. This leads to the end-game biomes becoming inaccessible, since you cannot raise your exposure rate high enough. Likewise, there is no conclusion to the game–eventually you just sort of run out of things to do.
Now, the first complaint is legitimate. A game with loose-end content at the end of the game being inaccessible is fairly disappointing. The second complaint however is irrelevant–I will explain why in just a moment. First, we must analyze a pattern in what I saw from the profiles of those leaving complaints on the Edge of Space’s page. They came in two varieties–people swearing the game was absolute trash with less than an hour under their belt and people swearing the game was absolute trash with 60 or more hours under their belt. The former group’s opinion seemed to be largely warped by their previous experience with Starbound and Terraria. This is understandable to a degree but I get the feeling that they bought the game expecting an exact copy of either of the two aforementioned games. Moving to the second people group (with 60+ hours), their complaints (aside from the inaccessible content) was that there was that the journey trailed off with little closure at the game’s finish, leaving them with no ending.
The error with both types of naysayers is that they forget completely the tale of both Terraria and Starbound. I personally have extensively played Terraria throughout its numerous releases and I can tell you that when the game was first released, it was exactly the same way. You traveled to the old castle, killed Skeletron and then… just sort of did whatever you wanted to. There were only 4 bosses, a handful of equipment to craft and a mere fraction of the overall content that exists today. The game was sold at face-value as a stand-alone game, and while updates to the game were never expressly denied at no point did the creators promise specific future content. Yet year after year, we got update after update and the game today is the massive result of years of work. Starbound has a similar story. Released as an early access game very quickly after the recognized success that Terraria brought, it wasn’t until years after its EA release that it was finally developed into the game we have today and even then not every single idea that was discussed during its creation was recognized.
You see, these games are the exception, not the norm; but their success has created an audience that wants or demands this kind of product right out of the box; conditioned by outliers. I bought Terraria for $5. I’ve played 1300+ hours. For free I’ve received an endless supply of updates. Ask yourself–what game, what game in any of history can you actually expect to pay $5 and receive this kind of result? None. None whatsoever. I cannot stress enough that as its stands, the Edge of Space likely has at least as much content as Terraria’s original release and is currently on sale for $3.37. True, the developers have abandoned the game. True, it’s likely that what you pay for is what you get. But we did the same thing for Terraria! And we played Terraria; and loved it! Of course new free content that add hundreds of hours of potential gameplay to a game we already bought dirt-cheap is great but it should never be the expectation, only the exception.
All this soap-box preaching leads me to the justification of my final conclusion. I played Edge of Space for an hour. And I had fun. And I want to play more. I don’t care if there is a loose end. I don’t care if it’s not as good as Terraria or Starbound. I don’t care if there won’t be future content. I liked what I got and I’ll see what there is to the end. I’m placing this in a personal Tier 1 category regardless of all the hate for it.
