SOL: Exodus is set in the year 2441, out in the beyond of our solar system filled with space combat featuring dogfights and battle with capital ships. It’s made by the independent developer Seamless Entertainment, from Austin, Texas. Their goal with SOL was to re-energize the space-action shooter genre and I think SOL is taking strides in the right direction.
SOL’s story starts out a lot like the one Joss Whedon told many years ago about a certain Firefly class ship that was captained by a Browncoat along with his renegade crew. When I say a lot, it’s like the dev’s really loved the backstory of the TV series Firefly and decided to make a game about it.
SOL is set “in the world of SOL, 500 years in the future, the Earth that we know and love has been ruined by centuries of war, neglect and abuse, and humanity has left it behind as they colonized the solar system. Their thirst for conflict, however, followed them. It was only once scientists realized the sun was dying that man finally learned to work together. And work together they did — to form the United Colonies of SOL (UCS) and its UCS-1 Mission; the last hope for mankind.” But of course conflict escalates years later as the sun dies and the Church uses fear to ready the remaining people for the Rapture.
I’m a huge fan of Firefly, so I was excited to pretty much be playing through the Unification War. Only problem is, after the decently drawn shell-shaded comic book style cut scenes, the dream collapsed and it was in fact a war rooted in religion. The tutorial leads you through the first stage so you can get a handle of your controls.
It turns out I was a bit shaky at the helm and it gave me a headache. Actually less headache, more motion-sickness despite my years playing video games that have included worse controls and flying an array of plane-like things. So I took some time to perfect the controls, but as I got better at controlling my ship, the faster I got sick. I think that part of this was that instead of feeling weightless, as space tends to do, it was like I was whipping a car around in a poorly designed racer.
The ships don’t reflect damage of any kind. They are healthy one minute and the next they are exploded. Towards the depletion of your ship, around 10%, the screen starts to crack. You may not be the best pilot but you can wreck as many ships as you want, because you can’t die. Your ship explodes and then you eject; it’s okay, you get another ship! Aside from being shot, if you crash into things your ship is not harmed. After a while of being locked onto enemy ships and feeling the need of a barf bag, I started using the ships as a braking system. It was a lot easier than using the thrusters and the slide mechanism to whip around to catch an enemy.
Without the help of the AI pilots, dogfights tend to drag on. During the fights there is at least one other ship out there with you combating enemies, but they are off doing their own thing. So far off, in fact, that only by occasionally bumping into them will you remember that you aren’t alone out there. The downside to the almost non-existent team is that you can’t control them. No offering directions, rendezvous points, or commands of which enemy to attack first. Each mission has the chance to, as a certain Hollywood commander would put it, do something dumb. The longer dogfights tend to simply turn into a game of chicken between you and your enemies, as circling cruisers while laying down heavy fire turns space into next year’s Red Bull Air Race.
There are 8 missions in SOL. The missions can be lengthy, but it doesn’t offer much to replay value. You could always go back to get achievements and perfect scores, but you’ll have to sit through the storylines because there is no skipping dialogue between the other characters. Within the missions you are pitted against the “Children of Dawn” (CoD). They are the fighters that represent the Church trying to stop you so that everyone can embrace a fiery mess of the exploding sun. Each mission is repetitious, either boiling down to chasing CoD fighters to blow them up, protecting a cruiser somewhere as CoD fighters attack by blowing them up, or hacking into a ship before you blow it up.
Hacking in space involves you hovering inside the cruiser ship above the indicated yellow beacon. A box of letters appears in the bottom right of the screen and you must track the highlighted ones. Once they are done flashing, you receive the option of picking which letters were displayed. Pick correctly and the ship is now vulnerable and you get to blow it up. What can be frustrating is that whenever you are hovering in the ship, the enemies are still firing at you. It would’ve been nice if some of my AI pilots could have provided me with cover fire!
Throughout the missions there are at least two climaxes; you would finish one task only to meet the face of another. After all, what fun is a game if you don’t have something to do? However, there aren’t any checkpoints or any mid-mission save option. Quitting in the middle of a mission will put you back at its start when you return. Despite the lack of saving, the game does not have a problem when alt-tabbed.
After a few missions I had had my fix of the space combat simulator, plus the room was spinning from the nauseating controls. It’s not quite there yet, but I believe Seamless Entertainment is re-opening the door to a genre that has been passed over by others. For an asking price of $9.99, SOL might offer you a glimpse into the days of old, but it may not fulfill that itch for a good space combat sim.
