I'm oddly fond of this shonky RTS that's decided Mass Effect is public domain now

Why bother filing the serial numbers off a beloved sci-fi property when you can simply use the file to scratch on your signature and call it a day? To be fair to ZeroSpace, not everything here is a knock-off of Mass Effect - quite a lot of it also pilfers from StarCraft. For instance, it has good ol' boy flamethrower marines that would definitely call Mass Effect a "space opry" if they ever said anything that wasn't a pun about setting people on fire. 

Mostly I just wish I'd known sooner that you can do this. No one can stop you, apparently! ZeroSpace has basically Matriarch Benezia in it. The not-Krogan are here too, except they're also sort of the Cabal from Destiny. It's all up for grabs! I hope you're as excited for Nic Reuben's Denis Villeneuve's Frank Herbert's Dune Part 3 as I am. ZeroSpace is shameless, shonky, and wince-inducingly pricey for how early access it currently is.

And I sort of love it. 

I sort of love it because, while transparently making a clumsy smash and grab for other, better works, ZeroSpace doesn't strike me as conceptually insincere, just insecure. What do we call this? Heartfelt cynicism? Earnest ratfuckery? At the game's core is a solid, meticulously tinkered-with RTS spread over several solo, co-op, and competitive modes. Skirmishes are responsive and varied. Campaign missions are studded with Blizzardy dramatics and bookended with exciting, "We've got company! Everyone to the bridge!" bits. The music's pretty great too, although there's currently not enough of it. 

It's also sincere in its attempts to spin a ripping space yarn, and some of it did actually work for me. More on this later, but I should make clear now that I don't wish to oversell ZeroSpace, which is to say that I don't recommend you buy it anywhere near… yet. There are currently 15 out of a planned 40 campaign missions and loads of the actual dialogue tree stuff is missing, so there isn't a great deal of chatting and there's only one actual moral dilemma. As it stands, Wings Of Liberty was far more of a reactive RPG than ZeroSpace seems, despite all its Turian-posing to assert dominance. 

And yet, like, there is something here, flittering about the halls of its hilariously brazen necropolis of zombie inspirations like a moth caught in a packet of moth-flavoured crisps. Do I dare call that something soul?

Well, there's certainly the old and weary soul of both a jilted Blizzard fan and a competitive RTS die-hard here, evident in how everything feels broadly like StarCraft 2 but after a once-over with the torque wrench. If a hot command could be hotter, or a common action could be pulled off with less spider-like digitry or cognitive stress, ZeroSpace has made it so. You can populate production queues with a single click, or queue your entire tech tree at once. Granted, StarCraft 2 may have also done some of this. I'd check but I lost my Battle.net account a decade ago and I've written so many horrible things about Diablo since that I'm too scared to contact support. 

There's a survival co-op horde mode against waves of bugs you can only stop by sending sorties to clear the map of bases, which is such a great idea. There's a massively mateyplayer 'galactic war' with its own Helldiverian faction struggles over sector control. The game's newsfeed has updates that narrativise the major events of the GalaWar in very serious sci-fi prose, but keeps the major player's Steam tags, so you get lines like, "The world has come over (sic) frequent and devastating attacks by the Council, spearheaded by Keeper commanders Hjodhr Skullblade and TheLordofBeers". 

But none of this is why I wanted to play ZeroSpace. I signed up for a taste of the "hours of cinematic cutscenes and interactive dialogues where your choices dictate the game’s outcome", and for the "choices and dialogue trees similar to Mass Effect and Baldur's Gate". I signed up because high-stakes sci-fi stories where you play roughnecked, tough-call making sons of guns who bicker incessantly with top brass have tickled a very specific part of my brain since Wing Commander 3.

You play as square-headed Shepard stand-in Prefect Aster, who is not a son of a gun, although may have been the result of a union between a static gun emplacement and an especially patriotic fizzy drinks machine. He's part of a marine corp called the Protectorate. They're your standard boots-in-the-mud space grunts - not like those city boys in the special forces Blackwatch! Look at them, swanning in at the last second and taking all the glory even though we're the ones risking our lives down here, goddammit.

He's a broadly likeable tool made sympathetic through various laments over all the good men we lost out there today. There's quite a lot of this stuff. The game's only tangible branching choice at the moment is whether to save some civilians or militia members before a planet blows up. I am still not over how devastated your comrade Kris Diaz looks while delivering the ornately stupid line, "I just can't help thinking of the poor suckers we left behind", which sounds like something Futurama's Bender would say while pretending to have emotions so he can steal someone's wallet. 

Here are a few more of my favourites. I do not think they are all stupid, or at least not merely stupid. Some of them are here because they are exactly the kind of lines I wanted, but in ways that actually surpassed my predictions, which I found delightful. 

• For the first few missions of the campaign, you fight not-Zerg aliens named the Grell. I will admit that 'zerg' doesn't not sound like the first mouth-noise someone in QA came out with when asked to pitch an alien species of skitterbugs, but 'grell' definitely sounds like the first noise they'd offer after learning 'zerg' was already taken. Instead of Creep - the purple jelly that Zerg spread to build on - they spread Grell grass. As in, "I can't see anything in this Grell grass! We're fighting on their terms in all this foliage!". The word 'foliage' is spat with powerful disdain.
• To acknowledge move orders, your basic marines say, "Movin'... tactically".
• There's a "What about protocol?" "To hell with protocol!" exchange in the first hour.
• A big spider mech piloted by a space New Yorker shouts "I'm walking here!" while stomping through the ruins of a war-torn city. 
• There is seemingly always someone waiting to chew Aster out for one to-hell-with-protocol choice or another after every mission, but you can tell he's a solid dude because he resolutely states that his "job's not done until everyone is safe from harm… and free of evil". No notes. You've really got to belt and braces your moral stance these days, the socials are wild.

In the interest of matching ZeroSpace's sincerity, here's some stuff I actually loved. I love the way the marines complain about top brass giving "such rosy speeches from the comfort of their capital ships", and how this extrapolates to basically every faction within and without the protectorate being some shade of distrustful of each other. I love the interpersonal gossip you can choose not to get involved with about how one of your crewmates has been fast-tracked from the academy, even if I'm not convinced the term "nepobaby" would have survived first contact with advanced extra-terrestrial civilisations.

I love that there are actually some really good original creature designs here, or at least designs that aren't from a BioWare or Blizzard or Bungie game. Giant space worms! Stompy crab bots! And I love how there are separate terminals on the bridge for each section of the upgrade menu, but you can access the whole menu before a mission and it's much more convenient to do so, so there's absolutely no point to this except that it feels space-cool to walk around and check all the terminals. 

I love these bitty green outlines. Look at them

And look, I'm obviously on some level opposed to what ZeroSpace is doing here, and I do wonder how it must feel as a creative to be brain-burgled to this extent. StarCraft famously ransacked the pantaloons off Warhammer 40K, although they didn't put in psychic space corsairs who look exactly like Eldar and act and talk exactly like Eldar and have the Eldar's backstory, which ZeroSpace kinda sorta does with a few things from Mass Effect. Perhaps the developers assumed no one would give a shit if they didn't dangle BioWare's absentee alien children, which makes me a bit sad. 

Do take my praise lightly. You see all the shameless Mass Effect stuff, you assume everything about ZeroSpace is going to be equally phoned-in, and the fact it isn't may well have given me an inflated sense of a good time. Is there a moral here? I dunno. Don't do this, probably. Be brave enough to spin your wildest and weirdest stories from the ideas that feel so specific to your experience that you're convinced no one else will relate or care, because that's the stuff that resonates the strongest, and don't miss Nic Reuben's Denis Villeneuve's Frank Herbert's Dune Part 3, in theatres this Winter.