Beyond Galaxyland Preview
When it comes to game design, looks can be deceiving. We’ve all looked forward to glorious-looking, triple-A blockbusters, only to experience pretty but shallow, disappointing gameplay. With Beyond Galaxyland, the opposite is true. It seems like a modest, pixel art RPG adventure. Underneath that facade, however, is a substantial and engaging game that blends several popular genres and mechanics.
Revenge of the Nerds
In Beyond Galaxyland you play as Doug, an unassuming teen with a passion for nerdy things like cosplay and games. When Earth is attacked by aliens, Doug runs off to save his girlfriend. He’s zapped by an alien and wakes up in a futuristic city on another world. His pet guinea pig BoomBoom has been transformed into a verbal, gun-toting sidekick. He has a helpful robot companion named MartyBot. If you predict that Doug’s overarching mission is to explore, defeat otherworldly monsters, save Earth, and find a way to return home, congratulations. You’ve played other games!
Don’t take that summary as a criticism. The premise is not what’s important, but what indie developer Sam Enright has done with it. In Beyond Galaxyland, Enright brings together elements of classic RPGs like Final Fantasy with the turn-based combat mechanics of Pokémon. And it works.
Beyond Galaxyland takes place in a 2.5D world. Or, more precisely, worlds. Doug travels to a variety of planets, each with a unique biome and theme. Each planet holds a bit of narrative momentum toward guiding Doug home. While there are some moments of visual ambiguity, Beyond Galaxy’s generally humble art does a good job of representing a variety of landscapes.
Take A Picture, It Lasts Longer
Exploration and combat make up the heart of Beyond Galaxyland. A fair amount of platforming relies on fairly forgiving controls. Nothing’s too exacting or frustrating. Places where Doug can move between foreground and background are well marked, both on the mini-map and an icon in the world. There’s a bit of environmental puzzle-solving, too. Again, pretty simple stuff but it adds variety to exploration.
Combat is turn-based and, as noted, pulls from the classics of the genre, including Pokémon. Doug can whittle away at a monster’s health and then capture it as a summons to use in battle. Naturally, summons have unique abilities. One cool little addition is that Doug has to take a photo of an enemy in the wild, outside of combat, before it has a health bar.
Combat is comfortingly familiar and generally enjoyable. Just like Pokémon, it’s easy to fall into a relaxing rhythm. There are stretches, however, with too many of the same enemy type where the only thing that changes is the number in a group. Overall, the introduction of new abilities, weapons, and monsters is paced very well. Most of the tooltips can be skipped.
Reading Rainbow
There’s a ton of unvoiced dialogue in Beyond Galaxyland, but it’s not overwritten. The tone is family-friendly with quite a bit of dry humor and references to well-known sci-fi ideas. I’m not sure that Doug — or any NPC — comes across as a fully developed character, but everything is affable enough and things move along quickly.
On the audio side, the chip-tune-ish music gets pretty repetitive as each section or encounter loops through the same track. There’s some effective use of controller vibration in combat, but environmental audio could use a little more love and presence, both in battles and during exploration.
Overall, Beyond Galaxyland is an impressively substantial action RPG. There’s a lot going on, both in the story and environment. Combat and questing draw from classic inspirations, and they’re lots of fun too. I haven’t seen or played Doug’s entire journey, but I’m certainly looking forward to it when the game releases for all platforms later this year.
Thank you for keeping it locked on COGconnected.
