With the bustling traffic of video games out there, it’s always a pleasant surprise when a team of six people can bring you something new, different, and entertaining. Throw in the fact that it’s priced at a bargain and you have yourself one hell of a value.

SOL: Exodus is a PC space shooter that sees you flying a space ship and, well, shooting shit up. While the name may not mean anything to you (or me for that matter, after playing the game), you’ll find quite a simple tale set in a futuristic Earth. While the story may not bend your brain backwards and snap it off at the cerebral cortex, it gives me a sort of BattleStar Gallactica nerd craze fix. With Earth destroyed, having to find a new Earth is a cool premise and, of course, a bunch of religious zealot’s want to stop you and “embrace eternity” (a Dead Space quote isn’t too far-fetched here, right?).

Unfortunately, the story does not compel you to play, but it does’t exactly bore the shit out of you, either. It’s nothing you’ve done a million times, but at the same time nothing you’ve not done before, if you follow me. The voice acting is there enough to make dialogue tolerable, but I was much more interested in the (some quote ‘outdated’) graphics and the mechanics of flying a ship in space than the presentation of the mundane story.

First off, the graphics are brought to you by the Unreal Engine. It’s not exactly Gears of War in space, but you a beautiful game, nonetheless. The ships details are great and the planet/space stars/galaxy imagery is incredible, being the best thing to look at. The lasers and explosions are mediocre, at least on my computer, and won’t make your jaw drop by any means. But for the $9.99 price tag, you really have no room to complain and the whole feel of the game harkens back to a kind of retro sci-fi era of Battle Star Galactica, at least with the explosions, story, and ship models.

Fuckin' religious nut jobs, ruinin' all the space flights for everyone

As a huge fan of BSG, I was ecstatic to learn the ‘slide’ maneuver. The ability for your ship to move in the same direction but rotate in air to shoot at other objects is awesome. It’s an equivalent to drifting in space and something BSG’s fighters did all the time. You can upgrade your ship, although there is little to no point. Giving my ship more battle armor rarely helped it stand up against the increasingly difficult enemies and missions.

The only true complaint I can make about the game are the stupidly hard enemies. It’s hard to shoot enemies some times, especially when the lock-on capability doesn’t always lock on the ship you’re looking at and instead cycling through all the enemies on the map. The poor lock-on makes missions infuriating when you’re trying to attack a certain type of enemy before it blows up the ship/missile launcher/friend you’re protecting. ADD’s are robotic mining drills that latch on to the ship you’re trying to protect and deal damage. My biggest complaint is with these small sons-of-bitches is they fly at the ship you’re protecting and you can barely see them. They are small tiny things, move faster than your missiles, and even if you get a successful lock-on, they outrun the missile and you still have to shoot after it. Then these fuckers latch on and do massive amounts of damage continuously until they are destroyed. When your ship has 100% health and losing 5% every two seconds, things get frustrating fast and you find yourself restarting the mission all over again. The lack of checkpoints or save systems royally screws you over during these scenarios. I often found some missions borderline impossible to complete due to the mass amount of damage these ADD’s inflict and the pain in the ass it is to find them and then kill them. If these were re-balanced or something to that effect, it would make the game a lot more enjoyable.

That aside, SOL: Exodus is an exciting proposition in a genre that’s criminally neglected and hopefully Sol can change that. The cheap price and the decent gameplay provide quality entertainment and makes me yearn for a big-budget, AAA space action title. One can hope for a BattleStar Galactica title based off the foundation of what the team did with SOL: Exodus.

REPORT CARD

Story: 65
Graphics: 80
Audio: 70
Gameplay: 76
Lasting Appeal: 50

Overall

75