14 DAY TRIAL // Habitat is a game that asks players to take a look into the future and see how the human race might survive if we were ever forced to leave this planet while unable to settle on another world and terraform it outright.
The actual premise of the game is a little ridiculous, with a swarm of nanoparticles driving humans away, but it fits well with the mechanics and the aesthetics of the title and offers an interesting set of gameplay challenges.
The space close to Earth, just outside of the atmosphere, is at the moment filled with a lot of satellites, one big space station, and plenty of debris, the result of a lot of activity from a variety of countries that have never bothered to clean up all the useless stuff that their missions generated.
Habitat imagines a future where the junk is mixed with a wide variety of actually useful modules that gamers need to mix and match and connect in order to create areas that can sustain themselves and the human population that will need to leave Earth.
The core mechanics of the game are pretty simple and involve positioning, some movement, and limited combat, but the first time I fired up the title from 4gency I was utterly confused and spent about five minutes randomly clicking on the objects that were strewn across the level trying to understand what I could do with them.
Engineers are used to actually move, connect, and repair habitats and players need to put together the various bits and pieces in order to both generate resources and create basic movement and combat structures.
It pays to actually read the descriptions of all the objects floating around, which often include a solid dose of humor, and to pay attention to how they can be connected, trying out new ideas to see if any combo is unlocked.
It’s initially fun getting stuff to build habitats and see the actions that can be performed for each, but the title currently lacks a clear end game.
Worse, I was unable to fend off the attacks of the nanoclouds, mostly because the weapons that space offers are inaccurate and hard to get into position.
The recent 0.20 update for Habitat introduced a number of new features for the game and re-designed the construction system to make it more precise, and the development team at 4gency says that it has plans to continue to expand the mechanics based on the feedback coming from the community.
The game is in Early Access, so some issues are to be expected, but while I played it, the title was stable and I experienced no crashes.
Check out how Habitat looks in action in the attached video and images.
