RetroSpace review: Disco Punk Horror at its finest.
Developer: The Wild Gentlemen
Publisher: Kwalee
Platform reviewed for PC
Platforms available on, Xbox Series Consoles, PS5, Steam Deck, Asus Rog consoles
Code purchased on steam.
RetroSpace is the name game from The Wild Gentlemen who released Chicken police into the Hive, Moses & Plato Last Train to Clawville and the upcoming game titled, Wild Tactics (which is on my Wishlist.)
You play as a janitor who is now the last hope for all of humanity! The space station Aurora 5 has been swallowed by a sentient black hole mutating the inhabitants and messing with time.
I will not go onto the story too much as I do not want to ruin it for you.
The story is told through NPCs that you gather through the game that open upgrade options to your weapons, scanner and mutamod abilities. There are 5 NPCS for you to find and save and bring back to your base the janitors haven and all the audio logs that are littered around the station so it’s well worth exploring every biome to get the full story.
Sounds very similar to System Shock doesn’t it. Well, it is but you will also see influence from Half-Life, and they do make it their own.
Combat in the game is fun and intuitive you will need to study your enemies to find their weakness and exploit it by switching to the appropriate weapon or by using the surroundings to your advantage for example you see an electric box and you have a bottle of water you can spray the water on the group fun away when you get the attention of an enemy and shoot the box and electrocute them. Or use a laser beam on oil to incinerate the mutants.
You can hack computers once you find a hack mod and switch the security gun turrets to recognise you as master this is a big help when playing the game so you can conserve ammunition.
Weapon wise you have a decent array, and you cannot buy these you have to explore the map to survive. The gun play feels great as does the mele and they did a great job of not over complicating any of those mechanics.
As mentioned earlier time plays apart but as in you have a time limit but the sentient black hole will move you forward and backwards in time, and this really does change the aesthetic of the game, when you are wondering around one time line the space station looks in good condition and less of a horror a more clean aesthetic is what I a was trying to say but when the time jump happens again that same space station is now a dark damp rotting station which lends to the horror aspect of the game. Different areas of the station open and close when you are jumping back and forward in time.
The enemies you will encounter are human flies, Giant pigs, spider like creatures Robots and androids, and plant-based enemies which remind me of stranger things and some little plant-based beasts as well.
You can use a train (Half-Life) to get to different biomes all with their own distinct aesthetic for example the botanical gardens switches from something that poison ivy would be proud of too Swamp Thing when you visit it again another timeline. The other biomes are the Police station, luxury suites, control room, Crew quarters these are found in the grand central station area, you also have the nexus hub area, where you can engineer, security and medical areas to explore.
Which you should make sure you pay attention to everything when you explore there are plenty of easter eggs one for example is a Starship Troopers easter egg, I won’t say what it is as I want you to find it for yourselves and you will find codes for the computers on walls in locks or right in front of you on a desk.
I didn’t experience any frame rate drops on my PC everything moved along very smoothly.
Graphically I love the 70s style colour palette and the nods to Fallout with the aesthetic from time to time before it all goes to hell.
Now a con for this game is the map, the map for me is basically pointless there are no map markers and you cannot place any however this is only a minor con for me as the developer has addressed comments on X and steam and they are working on stuff for the map when another patch comes out.
RetroSpace was released a few days before Gears of war E-Day, I did start to play E-Day but I found myself putting that game down and coming straight back to RetroSpace not because E-Day is bad as that’s not the case but it’s a testament to The Wild Gentlemen RetroSpace had me hooked and it was all I wanted to play.
Overall, I had a great time with this game, and I really hope The Wild Gentlemen continue the story. This is one of my favourite games released this year and there has been a lot of excellent games released, the fact that RetroSpace doesn’t try to be complex it wants you to pick it up and play it and be able to put it down and come back to it and you won’t need to relearn complicated mechanics.
RetroSpace is a FUN game and that’s exactly what I want from my games fun.
RetroSpace is a 9 out of 10 for me and potentially one of my games of the year.
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