Salvation Prophecy Review

By – David Queener

Salvation Prophecy by Firedance Games is an ambitious third person shooter and space dog-fighting game taking place between four different species battling for control over the galaxy. You can run multiple campaigns at a time utilizing a manual and auto save system, making it convenient for trying out a little bit on each side before settling on a race for the long haul.  The bulk of game progress comes in the form of combat. Infantry battles take place in the form of invading your enemy’s planets, destroying military structures, and fighting it out with their own soldiers in both ranged and melee combat. Dog-fighting occurs outside of space stations, as you move through swarms of enemy ships to then proceed toward the station itself, eliminating turrets and wearing down the station’s structural integrity.

In all of this, the music is soaring, and the volume of shots is quite impressive. There is at the start of every battle a sense of enormity, a grand scale to the sequence. Unfortunately this does dwindle over time as the numbers decrease, and the music gradually becomes inappropriate. Suddenly it goes from what seemed to be an epic battle to being a small skirmish, and eventually it is just remaining attackers standing and firing on structures. Eventually the combat flows more like an assembly line than clockwork.

This is the core issue of Salvation Prophecy. Not only does it feel like an assembly line, but playing it has a degree of clocking in at work. It seems that every battle plays out the same, where we rush head first into a group of random infantry, then we approach a building, destroy it by simply standing outside shooting at it, another wave of infantry spawns, we battle, and then on to the next building. As this goes on numbers diminish and upon destroying the final building the results are displayed and everything is over. You are suddenly back on your space station with a few more credits to purchase upgrades and no sense of progress other than that.

Upgrades are functionally useful, but painfully uninspiring. The name changes, and the stats marginally increase, but they remain the same visual weapon. There is simply no variety in the combat, with the exception of facing off against the Salvation with their reflective shields that require flanking mildly. Upgrades are also displayed linearly. You have to cycle through each iteration of your primary weapon as the measurements get slightly larger and the name changes, then the same for your secondary, then the same for your melee attack, and finally the same for an armor slot. There are no interesting decisions to be made with the weapons or upgrades, it is merely a matter of affording them.

The same goes for the ship upgrades and combat. However, I had come to dread the ship battles over the infantry, despite their opening portions being very impressive with the sheer presence of combat in the large amount of ships actively dogfighting, dodging missiles, firing, and evading one another. The flight portions have all the mundane touches of a sim, without the detail. Much of the tedium of real life can be found in what is essentially waiting around in a hurry, only to catch every red light. You climb into the ship, you wait in line to leave, you fly to a wormhole, you navigate the wormhole, you fly to another wormhole, you navigate that one as well, and then you are approaching the battle.

The wormhole navigation is far more difficult than the rest of the game, and can cost you so much in shields that you aren’t ready for battle by the time you get there. Simply glancing the walls of the wormhole  (which twists, turns, and accelerates) damages your ship and provides enough force to knock you into the other side, creating a frustrating cycle of bad experiences.. I found setting my mouse to the lowest sensitivity for the duration of the wormholes helped, but I had to change it back between them. It made the journey feel like labor, rather than adventure.

Ultimately I was left uninspired to play this game. The battles felt very big, and started nicely, but I never had a sense of interesting positions or scenarios as I never had to make decisions. It was simple steady progress that felt more like a grind than engaging in a war. Alas, this was all framed within game crashes, minor typos, unresponsive UI, and strange basic navigation treatment. These issues had a “straw that broke the camel’s back” effect when encountered among the growing mood of tedium about the gameplay

What is confusing about this impression is the seemingly random presence of unique personality and attention to detail. Things which could have been just simple confirmation prompts in other games are dialog branches in Salvation Prophecy. These branches show an appreciation of each species being different, and in the process reveal a bit of the developer’s sense of humor. The Wyr stand out in particular with their delight in explosives, unprofessional and childlike conduct, that Firedance Games saw fit to provide a content warning to the user that it is far more comical than others. They were aloof, but wonderfully so, and had enough character for a game unto themselves if left on their own to stretch and grow. Unfortunately the Wyr is the anomaly in the game’s material and cannot hold up the rest of it.

 I love the setting and goals of Salvation Prophecy.  I love what it is trying to do.  I even love how the battles begin. However, it ultimately has a feeling of a proof of concept, that was simply expanded upon rather than enriched. It would benefit immensely from the developer taking a modder’s perspective of coming in and not balancing or patching the game, perhaps providing different wave styles based on species, different modes of fast travel, or intentionally imbalancing them in power while starting with different numbers. Drones could harvest the fallen enemy for research materials, the Free Nations could experience performance boosts when increasingly outnumbered. If simply more variety and clear differences in species was implemented in conjunction with bug fixes, we might have a real gem on our hands.

Is It Worth The Money?

At present, no, not for the likes of me. With modifications by Firedance Games and bug fixes however, it could really push quite far forward. That is in the end what takes the wind out of my sails when playing.  It seems to have come so far, but not reached that intangible quality which connects a game to the player. Kindly there is a demo, and because of the qualities it does have, I would encourage you to try it. The developer crossed the gulf of content development and setting up the infrastructure with the game, as well as some rather nice personality aspects, but now they need to make it sing as their own unique release. Not my cup of tea as things are now, but it may be yours.