Introduction
ADR1FT is a first person survival game developed by indie studio Three One Zero and published by 505 Games. It was released to PC in March 2016 and PS4 in July 2016. An Xbox version was planned, but was cancelled.
Review
You wake up in the vacuum of space, floating, weak, held to a station by a rope that just barely caught your leg. The unthinkable has happened and the station is in shambles. Your crew is dead. You have to find a way back home and hope to learn what sort of disaster caused all this to happen, as you fight to survive and avoid dying from lack of oxygen.
You play as Commander Alex Oshima, the last remaining crew of the Northstar-IV space station. I was super excited to start playing this game, but in all honesty, my excitement and enjoyment turned stale and disappointing by the end of my journey. The story is a simple “get the space station working to come home” sort of cliché. Through the many hours it takes you to do this, you can find computers and audio logs left by your crew, that detail the life on the station before the disaster struck. Some of it I was into. Like the crew member who stayed at the station instead of going home and ruined his marriage. Or the one who wanted to do something worthwhile before he finally succumbs to his cancer. I enjoyed finding all this stuff.
Eventually you learn that the main mission that this crew was on, was helping with the cultivation of a Lunar Base. Mind you, you don’t learn that unless you read everything you find in the game, or listen to audio logs. Without it, you just have mission control, sometimes radioing you to figure out what you’re doing, and an AI screaming in your ear. It doesn’t help that the only time Alex ever speaks is when she finds the body of a crewmate, and even then she only says their name. Unless I missed it, you never truly find out what happened to the station.
The fact that you’re in space, means that you can move anywhere you want, in any direction. You can roll around, move forward, and even wonder what orientation to the ground is right. At first this was a ball, but it soon turned stale, as when you’re floating through space, you’re constantly hitting the R3 button to scan for boxes that contain oxygen, or else you die. Took the wrong path through the wreckage? Dead. Didn’t find an oxygen tank from that box? Dead. Use your boost too much? Dead, because everything shares the same oxygen bar! It took the thrill of space exploration and mixed it with a bland and boring survival element that at the end, I was not a big fan of.
You have a minimap in the sense that is just a radar, but for the longest time before I had a general idea of how it worked, I would get lost so much. I would end up going backwards which for some reason would end up causing some dialogue to repeat. But it has marks all over the place for things you can interact with. The only problem is it’s impossible to tell if it’s above you, below you, beside you. I finally ended up figuring out that the big arrow was sort of pointing me where I needed to go, but a lot of the time it was back to my point of “how do I navigate this debris while keeping oxygen?”. As you crash into objects, your visor ends up getting cracks and stuff all over it, which in turn messes up your HUD just a little bit. After a while, it’s just not possible for it to take damage. You can find spots to repair it, but I never bothered after a certain point.
The objectives in the game are all the same thing, over and over. Go to the central console, open up a new area, get a new upgrade that did nothing for you, repair a high tech thingamajig, go back to the central console, rinse and repeat. After the second area, I was just ready for the game to be over because there was no variety to the gameplay at all.
Rating
Pros:
- Space!
- Enjoyable Character Backlogs
Cons:
- Slow Gameplay
- No Objective Variety
- No Questions Are Answered
Summary
I love walking sims, I really do. Their environments are usually fun, the stories are exciting and sad, and there’s always so many mysteries to uncover. With this basically being a walking sim in space, I was so excited. But the story is a let down, questions aren’t answered, and the exploration is a chore the whole time! I can’t truly recommend this sadly.
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Game & Developer Information
Developer Website: Three One Zero
Developer Socials: Twitter
Publisher Website: 505 Games
Publisher Socials: Twitter
PSN Store Links: £15.99/€19.99 Europe / $19.99 North America
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