Playing A Game Drox Operative PC

Drox Operative is ... not what I expected.

What I expected, I guess, was an Escape Velocity-like trek across a galaxy, with trading, ship upgrades, divergent campaigns, et cetera. And there are similarities, certainly: it's in space, there are some Newtonian physics, there are lasers, planetary communications grant quests -- but the core concepts of Drox Operative seem to be informed by a number of other, different genres. The realtime gameplay, for one, most closely resembles Diablo, with random drops and equipment slots featuring pretty heavily. The randomly-generated game universe invokes a sense of Terraria, and the diplomacy and war options are reminiscent of Civilization or other similarly-sophisticated 4X-es. Point being, Drox Operative shows a fairly diverse set of inspirations, and some pretty lofty aspirations for itself.

Unfortunately, in combining all of these disparate mechanics, the game suffers from a serious lack of focus. Like a Civ match, there are multiple different ways to "win" the game, but each objective is so complicated and nuanced - involving intergalactic politics, experience levels, ship upgrades, equipment slots, named enemies, travel quests... yikes. While I'm normally a fan of dense open worlds, the elements littering Drox Operative's universe don't seem to have any intermediate purpose, other than more breadcrumbs leading to a victory condition. I don't know -- in the absence of a tightly-scripted campaign or questline, I just didn't feel interested in stumbling randomly around the universe looking for things to do.

And the learning curve is a tough sell. It took me long enough just to get the hang of the twin-stick and dungeon-clicker hybrid combat system. And I'm still nowhere near being able to understand the differences between the in-game races, which are a Dungeons & Dragons-like cloud of wacky statistical attributes and abilities.

I admire the hell out of Drox Operative for its ambitious design and marriage of varied game elements. But it's hard to play, and the moment-to-moment gameplay doesn't feel rewarding enough for the amount of effort it asks.