Guardians of Orion is an Early Access Steam game where the player controls a class-based Guardian and fights against dinosaurs and robots either alone or in multiplayer modes. Guardians of Orion’s primary issue is its lack of explanation with some UI elements and basic gameplay.
Tutorial?
Under the gameplay tab in the settings menu, there is an option to enable/disable the tutorial, which is enabled by default; however, no tutorial is present during either single- or multiplayer modes. Perhaps this is a feature that they are planning to incorporate, but haven’t yet? It seems like something that should be present from the beginning if its absence results in basic usability issues.
.
To control or not to control?
One usability issue in Guardians of Orion is based around how to control the game. Personally, I enjoy using controllers when playing PC games; however, it is not typically my initial guess that a PC game would base its usability on using a controller. This is the case in Guardians of Orion and it is never made obvious to the player, especially at first. Unless, of course, you’re perceptive enough to immediately take the only loading screen in the game as a gameplay hint…
More evidence for design geared toward using a controller is present during actual gameplay. My first playthrough was with a mouse and keyboard and I was unable to figure out some of the controls, including some of the mechanics in the bottom-left-hand pane of the interface:
Instead of fumbling through the main menu and attempting to memorize the keyboard controls, I decided to attempt my next playthrough with a controller. Here is the bottom-left-hand pane of the interface when playing with a controller:
To say the least, I performed much better during my second go. Nonetheless, the player should not have to fall flat on his face to figure out basic gameplay mechanics and usability. A fix for this would be consistency across controller types – incorporate the respective buttons for keyboard controls in the pane.
Low health-induced change blindness
Like many games, Guardians of Orion makes gameplay increasingly difficult as the player’s health diminishes. At a certain level of health, the glass in the player’s mask begins to break and worsens with diminishing health, resulting in clear cracks and ripples across the screen. Inherently, this is not an issue. However, a couple of the maps in Guardians of Orion (e.g. Goo-Summit and Goo-Whiteout) are full of snow, ice, and mountainous terrain that produces a light blue/whitish screen. Together, these result in a form of change blindness, primarily when the player is traversing/trying to evade enemies and prevent death. There were numerous times where the map terrain was confused for cracks in the player’s mask, which resulted in the player rolling directly into the terrain, immediately stopping movement, and dying instantly.
Final thoughts
Guardians of Orion is a fun game with lots of RPG elements that is even better with more people. Hopefully Trek Industries continues to work on the game; if they do, perhaps I’ll revisit this post in the future with updates! Until next time!