Gaia Beyond
Last updated: 2025-06-12
- Polished, visually appealing, and fun experience.
- Intriguing story and memorable characters.
- Vast universe provides freedom to explore.
- Core gameplay loop offers freedom of choice.
- Buggy, unfinished, and lacks content.
- Bugged quests and poor localization issues.
Verdict
Mixed
Summary
Positive 64% · Negative 36%. Score: 36 / 100
Positives:
- The game offers a polished and engaging experience with appealing visuals, immersive music, and a user-friendly interface. Players can enjoy a wide array of ships and weapons, enhancing the fun and replayability.
- The game features an intriguing and well-written storyline with engaging characters and branching narratives. Players can choose to follow the main quest or explore the world freely, adding depth and immersion to the gameplay experience.
- The game features a vast universe to explore, with a large map and many secrets to uncover. This encourages exploration and discovery, providing a sense of adventure and preventing boredom.
- The game provides a variety of activities such as mining, trading, and bounty hunting, allowing players to choose their own path. This freedom, combined with the game's core mechanics, creates an enjoyable and engaging experience.
- The game features a great soundtrack that enhances the overall experience and creates an immersive atmosphere. The music is well-suited to the space setting, with soaring classical strings and grungy electric and synth instruments.
Negatives:
- The game is plagued by numerous bugs, incomplete features, and a disjointed, unengaging story. Many reviewers feel the game was released prematurely, resembling an early access title due to these issues, despite being a 1.0 release. Some reviewers mention an increase in bugs since release, and the persistence of old bugs.
- Many quests are bugged, uncompletable, or lead to dead ends. Quest progression is also hampered by poor tracking, unclear objectives, and side quests that can fail without notification.
- The game suffers from poor or incomplete localization, with some languages missing entirely or containing significant errors. This makes it difficult to understand quests and follow the story, especially for non-English speakers.
- The game's flight model and ship controls are clunky and unforgiving, leading to frequent collisions and difficulty maneuvering. The autopilot is unreliable and often causes crashes, while collision damage is excessive.
- The trading system is rudimentary and unbalanced, with static NPC inventories, limited funds, and few opportunities for profit. Hacking is an imbalanced way to earn money, making other activities less rewarding.
Gameplay:
- The core gameplay loop revolves around mining asteroids, trading goods, completing missions, and interacting with NPCs and factions. Players can choose different paths such as trader, pirate, or bounty hunter. These activities allow players to earn money, explore the world, and progress through the game.
- Players can acquire and upgrade ships with various weapons, shields, and modules. A wide variety of ships are available, and blueprints can be found to craft more. However, only a few weapons are upgradeable.
- The game features top-down, arcade-style combat where players strafe, dodge projectiles, and utilize various weapons. Combat requires anticipating enemy trajectories and exploiting blind spots. Controls are similar to Asteroids.
- The game features a main storyline with multiple paths and numerous quests. The game world is dialogue-rich, with NPCs offering advice, items, and side quests.
- The game is slow-paced, with a focus on decision-making and exploration. The heavy reliance on dialogue can further slow down the pace.
Performance:
- Reports on game performance are mixed. Some players experience smooth performance, while others report memory leaks, crashes (especially in trade menus), and bugs that impact gameplay after extended sessions. The inconsistency suggests potential hardware or configuration dependencies.
- The game boots up quickly on Windows 10. This is a minor positive point, but not a significant factor in overall gameplay experience.
Recommendations:
- Many reviewers acknowledge the game's potential and enjoyable aspects, particularly its engaging world, dynamic combat, and RPG elements. However, they also point out that the game feels unfinished, like an early access title, and requires further development and content updates to reach its full potential. Some recommend purchasing to support the developers, while others suggest waiting for more polish.
- Several reviewers actively discourage purchasing the game in its current state, citing significant issues and a lack of content. Some suggest that there are better alternatives available in the genre, recommending players avoid this title until substantial improvements are made.
- A few reviewers suggest waiting before playing the game, recommending players postpone their experience until the main quest is expanded or the game receives further updates. This indicates a concern about the current length or depth of the main storyline.
- These clusters contain very little actionable feedback. They consist of emotional statements, thumbs up, and general encouragement, without providing specific details or constructive criticism. Therefore, they receive a low importance score.
- The game is seen as a spiritual successor to Space Pirates and Zombies 1, particularly appealing to players who enjoyed the original but desired a less restricted map and story. This comparison highlights the game's potential within the top-down space opera genre.
Miscellaneous:
- The game world, while vast and potentially rich in lore, currently feels incomplete. Reviewers question the availability of content such as maps, ships, modules, and weapons beyond the initial offerings. This suggests a need for more content to fully realize the game's potential.
- The game is set in a dystopian future within our solar system (Sol system). The setting features terraforming projects, sealed domes, and station-cities on major planets and moons, creating a unique backdrop for the gameplay.
- The game features handcrafted 2D graphics with a dynamic space background, built on a homegrown engine. Gameplay essentially involves moving and interacting on a flat plane.
- The game was independently developed by a small team of only 3 people without external resources. This highlights the passion and dedication behind the project.
- The game currently lacks mod support. Reviewers suggest that adding modding capabilities could significantly enhance the game by allowing community-created content and customizations, extending the gameplay experience.
