Asteroids was one of my early gaming memories from the 80s, and it is a constant theme that never dies in the gaming sphere. Asteroid Odyssey is a modern, almost incremental-like take on the asteroids theme, but its focus is on building your own spaceship to survive 15 levels of denser, faster asteroid clusters flying at you. This is a roguelike that will penalise mistakes early on, but if you get the basics right, you’ll be coasting through to victory.
In this game, asteroids are both your enemy and your friend. For each asteroid you blow up, ore of that asteroid’s material will be left behind for you, or later on, a mechanical grabber, to collect. These raw ores need to be converted into materials used to build your spaceship, and it is through this process that you’ll build out your behemoth of a warship over the course of a run. Your spaceship has a cockpit square, and if that blows up through asteroid collision damage, it’s game over. Every other part of your ship is fair game, though, so if you end up smashing into rocks and losing all your guns, lasers, and armour… you’ll still be ok as long as the cockpit is intact. For this reason, although you have free rein to build your ship how you like, protecting your cockpit is key. The cubic format of ship building can let you make creative patterns and designs, but know that the wider the ship, the harder your early run will be. Stay narrow and focused so you can focus your attention on only a portion of the danger.
Different asteroids are made of different materials, and the longer you survive, the more variety of asteroids appear. There are six types, and different weapons or abilities are related to specific materials. Red asteroids build flamethrowers and buffers. Green builds Gatling guns and healing elements. Blue are handy for lasers. You’ll want to blow up asteroids in general, but if you prioritise anything outside of your immediate trajectory, it’ll be wise to target what you want to invest in. This also matters for your overarching skill tree, too. You can unlock weapon modules for your ship, but also speed, power, and ore processing improvements over time. The resources required to unlock the next upgrade will swap across all six materials as you upgrade them. It is a way to stop players from completely skewing the odds into a very one-directional ship that is fantastic at one thing and awful at everything else. It does limit some of your choices early on. One choice you can include is powering up your mouse cursor, which acts as a weapon and healing target all of its own. You can also right-click on asteroids to focus all the ships’ weapons on one object, which is incredibly useful in the mid-game, where the difficulty is at its most challenging.
Asteroid Odyssey has a difficulty balancing problem, which is tied to the core of the game design. If you don’t choose good upgrades and get damaged heavily early on, you’ll lose weapons and then have to pay out more resources to rebuild them. This often leads you to a tipping point where you can’t catch up, and you’ll face certain death. Choose wisely, and survive the mid-game spike where denser, faster asteroids appear before you’ve killed them and earned their materials to build the new weapons they unlock, and suddenly, the game is extremely easy. Each time I played the game, if I made it to level 12 of 15, the game suddenly became so easy that I could leave it on autofire and do a household chore, only to come back to the victory screen. That feels wrong, and I hope the balance is addressed post-release.
The other issue is that when navigating the skill tree and building menus, any asteroids hit by the flamethrowers will continue to burn until they explode. It is a cheap exploit that players can take advantage of by accident. There is a fundamental issue with the gameplay being quite samey throughout, but if you don’t mind low-key tweaking and optimisation over a 45-minute run of something, you’ll be fine here. It is more a comment on the fact that the gameplay is identical from the opening minute to the final minute. There needed to be some kind of variety beyond colours and health points of rocks to elevate the game beyond being a low-key fiddler. There are three challenge modes to complete, but I think an easy difficulty modifier is forcing a player to have a specific width of spaceship. Suddenly, a player is worried about more of the playing area smashing into them, and that means more juggling of resources.
If those issues can be addressed, Asteroid Odyssey would be a niche recommendation for players who enjoy ship building and tackling a slow-burning challenge over time. There is some satisfaction gained from watching your creation become all-powerful, but it currently happens too early in a run, leaving you feeling a bit empty at your achievements. All it needs is a splash more player strategy, and we’ll have a winner.
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