Drox Operative is an action role-playing game within a 4X strategy simulator. Now, if you’re like me, you’ll be relieved to know that you’re only in control of your own ship while the politics of galactic conquest wage around you. I’ve never been able to get the grasp of 4x games. I seem to get lost in all the choices and all the detail. In Drox Operative your only responsibility is yourself. You are an outlying member that has no default alliance with any of the existing races. Your sole purpose is to survive and prosper, aiming to achieve one of the several victory conditions. You can choose to ally yourself with one or more of the several races and help them become the dominant race, or you can wage war against them all and win through military victory. There are several victory conditions, but none of them are simple to attain.
In a Diablo-esque format, you can get quests from the races you encounter as you fly around the various interconnected star systems to try and increase your favor with them, with the end goal of helping them to victory. Along the way, you will gain experience points and a multitude of inventory items that you can add to your ship to make it more effective in combat. Your ship also has statistics that you can improve with your skill points you gain as you go which will make your ship faster, better, bigger, and capable of holding more inventory. You fit your ship with various items that you obtain through combat or purchase or are awarded through quest completion, but you have to be selective due to limited capacity and power. Each weapon or shield will drain from your total power, so even if you have room for it, you might not be able to use it.
Each time you start a new game, the systems are randomly generated, as well as the races and their locations, so no two games will be identical. This is great, except that sometimes the game seems to take off at an unexpected pace and you find yourself scrambling to keep up. In one of my games, I felt like I was doing very well and I had been helping the race that was really wiping the floor with the rest of the races they came in contact with. However, they were so good at taking over, I never formed an alliance with them before they were the only race left. So, even though they liked me, we weren’t allies, and so I lost the game because I wasn’t a military ally with the sole surviving race.
It was still a lot of fun to see the whole thing come about, though, so I guess it just proves that this game is pretty good because it doesn’t really matter if you win or lose, you’ll still have a good time along the way. If you’re a fan of 4X games but feel overwhelmed trying to keep it all straight, this game is a nice alternative. You get to experience all the same types of instances, but rather from an observer’s perspective with the ability to sway the outcome with your singular input.
At the time I am writing this review, I hadn’t had a chance to play with the multiplayer co-op side of the game and I am extremely curious to see how that plays out. I can imagine that it would add a little extra tension and a lot of enjoyment.
The graphics and sound are fairly basic and uninspiring, which is probably the biggest downfall of the game, in my opinion. I think the concept is strong, and the execution is technically well-done, but the game lacks any real wow-factor.
Where the game shines is in its replayability and depth. You can rest assured that the AI races are all extremely motivated to be the last ones standing. You just have to figure out who to put your chips with and hope to come out on top. Because the end-game isn’t completely up to you, it does leave you feeling a little frustrated sometimes after you build a ship with some pretty good stats only to have to start over because the victory conditions were met.
In the end, I would recommend this game to anyone who is looking for an intriguing space-based action RPG within a living, breathing, warring galaxy, with a ton of replayability due to the randomness of each instance of the game. I think this would be very fun to play with a friend, especially. Drox Operative is definitely a unique game that focuses on content over presentation. I look forward to sinking several more hours into this game and look forward to seeing what happens with each new galaxy.
