SUPERMASSIVE IS DOINGAN INTERSTELLAR?

Upon starting a new game, you are presented with three difficulty options: forgiving, lethal
and challenging. And for each difficulty level, you get two more options: Exploration and Survival. Exploration allows the use of Turning Points system in the game before finishing
the story, while Survival only allows its use
after finishing. The Turning Points system
allows players to rewind events to a point
where a critical decision can be made.

Making it possible to alter undesirable
outcomes during the first playthrough.
While survival forces players to deal with
the consequences of their actions until
they finish the story. Only after finishing
then do they unlock the ability to revisit
past moments and attempt to get
an alternate outcome. The game itself is
made up of 8 chapters that we finished
in about 10 hours, taking our time to look
around and take screenshots.

Directive 8020 employs the use of a third person over-the-shoulder camera as its perspective. Throughout the 8 chapters,
there are multiple points where you have
to stealthily sneak around enemies trying
to avoid alerting them. Stealth is very
barebones and frankly boring.

The enemy AI is dumb; I have locked eyes
with an enemy searching for me a few
times and did not get detected.

Eventually, it got to a point where getting
a stealth section felt like a stop on
the action, like it was made just for
the sake of it. There was also a lot
of time spent crawling through vents.

Supermassive’s games are at their best
when it comes to gameplay during
quick-time events. Yet, we only get one
decent section in the whole game where
rapid quick-time-events happen.

Supermassive’s interactive horror games focus more on story and player choice than gameplay. So the quality of the story as well as the impact and amount of choices given, is crucial to
the game’s success. Directive 8020 will not captivate you with its narrative, but it will
keep you engaged with the story. It is their
first sci-fi game set in space, where you play
as multiple crew members of a colony ship called the Cassiopeia. Events take place
around the time when the hibernating crew wakes up from a 4-year deep sleep period
as they near their target destination.

The recently awoken crew quickly realizes that something has gone awry and embarks on
an arduous trial where they uncover some
dark mysteries. The game despite having
some missed opportunities, its still makes
for a compelling story that you would want
to see through. The amount of choices
given is decent, with the choices being significant in impact. Some of the choices
that the player can make in earlier parts of
the game are going to have a critical impact
on events that will be transpiring later
in the story.

“I keep wondering, am I condemning myself forever?”
~Young

Visually, the game is very impressive with high graphical fidelity. The game builds a great
gritty, dark atmosphere that leverages
the great soundtrack of Directive 8020.
And it achieves  all that at a very stable performance level. However there were
parts the acting or the facial expressions
of some characters felt awkward.

There was also one part where a terminal that
I had to interact with in order to progeress
was no longer active, which forced me to retrace some of my steps  to reactivate
the interaction option with the terminal.
But beyond that, Directive 8020 was
a very smooth, consistent, and visually appealing experience.