One of my favorite settings for video games is space. The final frontier has long held gamer’s interest because of the infinite opportunities it can represent. Traveling through a new universe on a new adventure should always feel like the first step of a thousand-mile journey. Sernur.Tech is a relatively new developer being published by Gameforge, and for their first title, they went the space route, following in the footsteps of the critically acclaimed space-roguelike FTL.

Trigon: Space Story takes the idea of an enterprising captain on the run, picking up new crewmates as you upgrade your ship and manage supplies, and tries to put their own spin on it. Instead of traveling away from a constantly advancing threat, you jump around a galaxy with multiple sectors that you must fight bosses to move between. A primary questline has 4 chapters, each following its own unique protagonist in this universe. While the concept had me hooked, unfortunately in practice the hyperdrive fails to activate. A lack of polish and annoying mechanics soil a great idea with a game that falls nose-first into an unexpected asteroid.

Story

While there are multiple interesting and unique story chapters, there is nothing groundbreaking here. Every quest is some variant of “go here, fight them, go elsewhere.” A lack of variety of missions feels lackluster, and I felt no need to continue following the story when I had a side quest to go do instead. The issue that comes about is when you lose and must restart the story from the start. Each chapter is self-contained and you must beat the previous chapter to unlock, so if you fail to finish the story quests and die you must start again, completing every quest and battle you just did. While this shouldn’t be too annoying, the story locations are randomized, and traveling between sectors with a non-upgraded ship is very difficult, and I found my ship and crew being lost in fiery explosions far too often to enjoy the universe I was struggling through.

The overall tone of the story missions is cool for the first few playthroughs, but it got to the point where I had done the first eight quests a total of 10 times and was still unable to progress. While writing game reviews and being able to play games as work is pretty cool, this is one of the first times it actually felt like I was working to play this game. The story did little to drive me along its path, and I can say it didn’t really impress me with any twists along the way.

Gameplay

If you have seen or played FTL, you basically have the concept for Trigon. While there is less urgency to your quest, it follows the same formula of jumping into a sector, engaging with an event or an enemy, managing your resources, and jumping closer to your goal. Unfortunately for Trigon, it really didn’t feel like it broke the mold in any way. Managing your cargo can be annoying, space stations are either few and far between or right next to each other, and getting blown up is a regular occurrence. So regular, that I couldn’t believe that I was playing the game on the standard difficulty.

Enemy ships will regularly surprise you with fully kitted ships, multiple missiles and lasers, and even squads of enemies that will teleport onto your ship and kill your crew. Multiple times I’ve found myself with a nicely upgraded ship and crew, just having beaten a boss ship, and a random encounter enemy hits me with missiles that cause damage to multiple sections of my ship. With everything suddenly exploding, I’m unable to escape and lose everything and have to go boot up another game from the start.

To clarify, the gameplay isn’t bad. It’s simply okay. I never found myself “wowed” over something or wanting to dig deeper into a story or game mechanic. Progression is so asymmetrical and difficult to track that my whole goal simply became gaming the system to win as best I could, and still failing. The procedurally generated universe being new every time meant that I needed to get lucky on a run not to be blown to smithereens or run out of fuel and supplies.

There was no best practice I could find and instead had to hope that the RNG was in my favor. That is not a good feeling in a video game and was the primary reason I had trouble with Trigon. While there were permanent upgrades available after a successful run, getting to that point was a struggle and those upgrades might not necessarily help you survive any better. Again, it came down to luck for most of my winning runs.

Audio And Visuals

The sights and sounds of Trigon were the main things that I enjoyed. 3D models and environments meant that the battles popped and were interesting to see, while the sound design kept me engaged in moments of battle and in the quiet afterward. While it isn’t the prettiest game I’ve seen this year, it ran well and looked good. The only complaint I have is the lack of diverse effects and just terrible ship destruction. If I’m going to blow up so many times it could look a bit more awesome, instead of like a sad burning boat that breaks apart.

Replayability

Don’t. Just don’t. Once you finish the main campaign, you will have tried every decision you can in the questlines and will probably have your brain melted by the continuous death tunnel you’ve thrown yourself through. In all honesty, the only replayability that I liked was in the free mode.

In free mode, you can explore the galaxy at your own speed, and the lack of story quests actually felt much more fun than the story campaign. While doing free-play I actually began to have a good time, living out my space mercenary dreams. Or at least I tried to, but continuous death and loss of progression put a big damper on that refreshing feeling of joy.

Other gamers might find themselves able to drop hours upon hours into the procedurally generated galaxies of Trigon: Space Story, but it couldn’t be me. Procedurally generating the game scape means the developer doesn’t have to actually develop things for these areas of the game, and instead the game can make it up for them. What that leads to is unbalanced gameplay, annoying issues with the generation, and frustration at being unable to know where things are between restarts.

What It Could Have Done Better

Trigon: Space Story felt like a 3D FTL. That’s about it. While there were clear attempts to differentiate it from the game that is quoted throughout the store pages and developer talks, it falls remarkably short. Instead of a game based upon the concept of another game that took its own route, we have a game that tried to have the best parts of its “inspiration” carry it to better sales and gameplay than it has. Trigon almost feels like a fan-made homage to FTL instead of a game that can carry its own weight. Actually creating interesting gameplay loops instead of letting a computer generate the whole game would probably have worked much better, as opposed to the unbalanced galaxy we are so rudely thrust into after each of our failures.

The confusing UI and random bugs made it difficult to tell if some of the design choices were that or just bugs that blended well. While your characters can be recruited with some traits, I wasn’t able to find a way to check what those traits did. Jumping between systems or fleeing from fights sometimes led to weird bugs where it claimed I defeated the enemy ship or, in a worst-case moment, just claimed I died and reset me back to the main menu. Being unable to load that save meant I lost an hour of progress because an incorrect message came up, and then I had to start fresh from the beginning of the story.

Verdict

I really wanted to like Trigon: Space Story, and it still has potential. With some changes to the central coding of the game, a semi-structured universe, and some new balancing it could actually be a game I want to play. As it stands though, I’m disappointed that this game is released in the condition it is in. Bugs and unbalanced gameplay stand to the forefront, with an annoying UI and repetitive playstyle following shortly after.

I didn’t have a good time with Trigon: Space Story. I hope the developers can fix some of these issues, but I’m not holding my breath. While I do think some people will really enjoy this game, I also know that some people really enjoy walking on hot coals. To each their own. If you want to see some gameplay, check out the video at the top of this review and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Trigon: Space Story will be available on Steam and Epic Games Store on April 28th.