In space Siege the future of Mankind looks pretty grim. Earth is in ruins, almost every human was killed in the battle against the alien attackers and the space ship Armstrong has been the only one able to escape. But even mankind's last sanctuary is swarmed by aliens. As Seth Walker you try to prevent the final eradication of mankind by the Karak.

The demo version of the game is available for download. As soon as the 957 MiByte file package - the time of 50 MiByte demos seems to have finally gone - is downloaded, the installation is finished quickly and you can play to one available mission. The first thing to attract our attention was the perspective.

Zoomed out to the max, the player sees his character from almost directly above and has a good overview. This is good if you are surrounded by several enemies. But you can't really see where the map continues. Fortunately a close camera position, which follows Seth like the one in Assassin's Creed, can solve this problem.

We took a short tour through the demo and want to deliver a first impression. The game mechanics is mixture of old and unfamiliar things. Controls are based on the Point-and-Click principle - left click: move, right click: action, mouse wheel: zoom. But who expects a RPG like Dungeon Siege like be disappointed.

The game is focused on action. For example, there is no inventory and thus the hunt for better equipment is not possible. But you can more or less upgrade Seth Walker with cybernetic implants. Those implants make the fight against the Karak easier, but the course of the game drifts towards alternative endings.

In matters of performance, we played the fight at the beginning of the playable sequence. One time we activated 8x AA and 16:1 AF and on the other time we deactivated the visual improvements. We used a Radeon HD 4850 and a Geforce 9800 GTX for our tests. We noticed, that both cards didn't have any problems with Space Siege although the MAD card did better with the average frames.



The course of the frames reveals that both competitors are doing well, with or without Anti Aliasing, and the framerate didn't often drop below 30 fps. On the other hand the cards weren't able to noticeably exceed the 60 fps limit - it is possible that there is a frame limiter.

A detailed test will be delivered later on. The game itself will be published in August.