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If I had to describe 3089 in one word, it would be confusion. If I had two words, it
would be style confusion. If I had three words, I would be speaking too much. So Im going
to drop this little thing right now. 3089 is a sci-fi, open world, procedural,
FPS… RPG… kinda thing. In 3089, youre an android, dropped into this procedurally
generated world. You can take quests ranging from assassinations to placing a bug on an
enemy, to rescuing a fellow android. 3089 does so many things, but in my opinion it
doesn’t entirely do any of them all that well.
You are, unconventionally, on the red team. Enemies are blue. You spawn in a giant red
base with lots of oddly shaped buildings and friendly androids scattered about. In these
buildings you have kiosks for things like weapons, armour, quests, and more. From these
kiosks you can buy and sell said items. For the record, the developer, Phr00t approached
me on my Facebook page and offered me a free copy of the game. I need to also make a note
in this review, that this game has a lot of stuff in it, and even with over maybe 50 hours
in it, I never really found myself getting very far. So you can think of this as a super
incredibly detailed impressions video or just a very shallow review.
As far as actual gameplay goes, in 3089 it has some variety, if vague. You can train
as a stealth character that can sneak up on enemies and deal high damage, or perhaps be
a solider with high damage from a distance, or someone up close with a weapon attachment
with multiple shots like a shotgun, or perhaps just a mix of it all.
When starting a new game you can choose some preselected classes, but effectively these
are just combinations of perk points which you can set-up on your own if you go with
custom class. These are merely to give someone a start in the game and show them what perks
are important to that kind of play style. In the end it really makes no difference outside
of helping you focus your play style. There is actually a class for piloting. And
piloting crafts can be an easy way to get some firepower early on. Aircraft are just
lying about in the spawned base for you to take. Though they have no damage meter, so
if youre in a dogfight, youll find yourself stunned and falling out of the sky. Thankfully
there is no fall damage. If youre playing a conventional soldier, then
youll be needing weapons or guns. Weapons in 3089 have variety… but its the
same kind of variety that BorderLands 2 boasts. By that, I mean its randomized, but that’s
all it really has going for it. So for example, you can find different magazine style, barrels,
and bodies each with their pros and cons and slew of stats. Even scopes and other options
to place on-top of the weapon. Part of this weapon item system is the ability
to break down a weapon, replace a part and rebuild it to upgrade it. This is very interesting,
but in the end due to the games item system, it makes it feel very tedious.
That brings me onto the item system in the game.
Items all have stats in 3089. Weapons for instance have things like rarity, damage,
range, et cetera. Armour has things like resistance or extra perk enhancements like stealth or
guns. This is all good, but when you want to upgrade your weapon there is no easy way
to compare stats. You have to hold your cursor over one weapon or part, and remember the
information before moving onto the next one to see if its even better. This sounds like
a small problem, but when playing as a conventional soldier character, you need to have the best
gear possible, and this little handicap makes finding better items just a giant pain in
the ***. And youre doing this for every part and even more, youre commonly youre going
from kiosk to kiosk looking for the best items listed.
Now, I mentioned earlier there were quests, but if you thought Skyrims infinite quest
system was bad, youve not seen anything yet. This games quest system is as bland as is
possible. It has generally 2-3 steps which generally are completely unrelated. And they
follow the same kind of pattern. Plant bug on James Gargleson. Rescue Katherine
Dobson from the gang. Pick up the Cube from the Ocean.
Generally these steps are completely irrelevant, and they look so generated its incredible.
And pay attention to the names. This game uses regular human names for androids. These
androids do not look like people yet have names like Rodriguez, or Patterson, or Katherine,
or whatever. This is something that I cannot help but laugh at. I do not know why this
is in the game, but it does not make sense to me.
In the end, the quests are incredibly underwhelming and seem to not even try to hide the procedural
nature of them. Now I have a small complaint with the world
itself, and this has to do with the scale. Some areas feel huge while some feel kind
of strangely small. Generally the bases feel huge, but I don’t think they should. They
are so spread out, I feel like I spend so much time running around from building to
building trying to find the items I need. Scale is good, but you don’t want the game
to feel empty. Now once you have your armour and weapons
and got a quest, you are tasked to leave your safe base and move out into the world.
There are enemies in the skies, on the land, and in the oceans. And no matter my gear,
I always find myself dying. A lot. And this combined with the random chance of losing
items, it can be very frustrating. I found actual gun-play incredibly unsatisfying.
Most weapons have horrible accuracy and out in the field youre trying to kill someone,
but you can’t simply sit idly by and wait for your cross-hair to slowly work its way
down to a point, you need to keep shooting, but you will likely miss all your shots, even
if youre close. Now, I think we need to move onto the UI and
Menus. This is a big part of my complaints due to how much they affect how the game feels.
They’ve gotten significantly better, but still could use some strong work.
The UI feels cheap and thrown together generally. Fonts look like something out of a cheap mobile
app game. Yes, they work the part, but are always all caps and simply aren’t easy to
read in bulk most of the time. They are most suited to titles, but not really something
to be used everywhere. There was a recent update which made the HUD
significantly better, in making it color-coded and shape based for easy reading at a glance.
But overall it still has that kind of cheap feeling to it. Id like to see a graphic designer
really do an overall to it. The menus are a bit better laid out. But suffer
from really strange behaviour. When you want to change volume, for instance, you literally
have to type in the value by hand. This might be nice as an option, but there is no button
or slider. The game guide is also hard to read due to all the fonts and colors. Making
it just a wall of text youre supposed to comprehend. The game has some visual toggles in the effects
menu like Toon mode, Anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, shadows and draw distance. Anti-Aliasing
has never actually functioned properly for me. In the game itself, its listed as YES
or NO, but in the game launcher it shows options for Off, 2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x. I don’t understand.
Next to that Ambient Occlusion does technically work, but just looks broken or just really
really fast. You see many copies of nearby objects like a really simple screen-space
effect. Item icons themselves are also really cheap
looking. They look like clip-art modified in MSPaint.exe. They look like photos or high
detail graphics scaled down as icons. I think the developer should ditch all the icons and
remake them in a symbolic form. This smoothly brings me onto the graphics
of the game. Now look, I have a soft spot for surrealist
or impressionistic designs as much as the next liberal arts student making youtube videos
in his bedroom, but this game doesn’t seem entirely convinced of what it wants its style
to be. Trees are blobby and low poly, desert trees are sticks with some green bits. And
it reminds me of some sort of old N64 game in the charm of it and the looks of the landscape.
It does have charm. The game seems to want to have a wacky, off
the wall style, but uses relatively realistic texture styles, which are troublesome because
they are incredibly low resolution, and consistently are oddly scaled or skewed at some strange
angles. For instance, the “Diamond-Plating” textures
he uses for walls on the base are rarely ever scaled properly. Not only are the “diamonds”
the size of surfboards, but up near the corners the texture is completely unrecognisable due
to the scaling. Instead of fixing the textures, I think he
should get rid of them entirely. Just use some repeating patterns, gradients, or some
other procedural design which can be scaled perfectly in the game and it would fit with
the game style. Along with that, the scaling plays tricks
with my eyes and mind. Some textures look like normal brick but each brick is the size
of a van, which makes me feel like an ant on the floor or something. Keeping the scaling
consistent and somewhat realistic would help make the size of the world work better.
Well, what about the music in the game? Well, it has music.
Through-out most of the game. You have some royalty free piano/ambient music playing on
loop for the entire time. Perhaps 2-3 songs. But when in combat you have this heavy electric
guitar… rock tune instantly start playing, but when youre finished with that combat,
it will instantly snap ack to piano. The main theme for the game in the main menu is really
the only music that sounds like it fits and oddly enough that happens to be because it
was written for the game itself. So I wish there was more custom music designed for the
game. Now, there is one giant part of the game I
havent touched on, and that is the story of it.
If there is a story, I never felt compelled enough to do enough quests to find out. So,
that’s part of where my review falls flat. I should also mention there is the ability
to take over bases and some building mechanics for designing your own outposts. I never really
got far enough into the game to work with those. So perhaps you can check out some other
reviews or coverage that explain those. The price of this game is currently ten dollars,
or 9.99. So its not pricey, but at the same time, there are thousands of games at this
price or lower which look better, play better, sound better, and are more enjoyable. On the
other hand, there is no game quite like this, its quite unique.
Im not going to say that Im a perfectly unbiased reviewer, but I did try to be fair. Think
about what I talked about and then consider looking at some other reviews to see if its
something youre looking for. In any case, the developer seems dedicated
to releasing frequent updates and accepting feedback on his game for improving it in the
future. Currently I believe 3089 is his only project, he has yet to move to the undoubtable
3099. Im sure he will have some solid fixes and updates to the game to make it much better
than it currently is. At the same time… this game is officially launched. Patches
are nice, but they shouldn’t be needed for a fully launched title.
Thanks for watching this review. I want to thank the developer Phr00t_ for providing
me with a free copy of the game for review and gameplay content, and staying in contact
with me at times. If youd like to see more reviews like this please subscribe to the
channel. Im also on Twitter and Facebook, links to those in the description along with
links to purchase 3089. That’s all from me, thanks again for watching and see you
again very soon.