The story in Cubic Odyssey is that you’re a knight that crashlands on a planet. You are tasked with traveling through the galaxy as you work to take down the Red Darkness and eventually make it back to your home planet. As generic sounding as the story is, it’s told really well. The fact that we have a story in a game that pays tribute to games like Minecraft is rather refreshing and nice to experience in a game like this.
Though Cubic Odyssey looks like Minecraft, it plays more like a voxel based No Man’s Sky. You start the game stranded on a planet. You have to gather resources to build up base defenses against the hostile inhabitants of the planet and for general survival. Once you have spent enough time gathering resources and making the items needed, you can rebuild your ship and gain the ability to travel around the planet and eventually out into the galaxy.
Each planet you come across has different environments, precious resources, fauna, and hostile forces. Some planets and space stations even have NPCs that you can trade with. This will get you experience and may also help you to get something that you need in order to continue your journey home. There are a few job classes offered in the game that you can pick from at the start. What job class you choose will give you bonuses when it comes to your character’s abilities.
The classes are Miner, Pilot, and Knight. The miner class excels at resource gathering with a bonus for mining speed and number of resources harvested at once when it comes to raw materials. The Pilot is specialized in space combat and ship management. The bonus they receive are cheaper repairs, ships being more energy efficient, and ship shield durability. The Knight class gives you bonuses for clearing dark cubes, obtaining more resources from dark enemies you encounter, and overall are more effective in combat than the other two classes.
Once you pick your class, you then get to pick how you want to play the game. You have your choices of Survival, Creative, and Adventure. Survival has you combating the Red Darkness which is an infection threatening the galaxy. This is essentially Adventure Mode but without having the end game objective and story elements. Creative provides unlimited resources and allows you to build without restrictions such as needing specific resources to build something. Adventure presents you with the story elements of the game and gives you the end game goal of getting back to your home planet.
All three modes are able to be played either solo or multiplayer; with multiplayer being offered in the form of local co-op or online play. If you plan on playing multiplayer, keep in mind that you can only play with up to four people. I think that this is a missed opportunity for a game as massive as this. I think that the limit should be somewhere in the neighborhood of up to eight players at once. The four player limit just seems too small of a number, though I am glad that it’s here for those that want to play with friends.
When it comes to graphics, Cubic Odyssey looks really good. Now I know some will say that of course it does because it’s made of blocks. While this is true, there are a lot of things that make it stand out from other games that it pays tribute to. For instance, the textures on each block are rather impressive. They are very detailed and a lot higher resolution than I initially thought they would be.
The galaxy that you fly around in looks nearly lifelike and the cubed planets have a lot of details to them with varying amounts of color based on its rotation relative to the sun it orbits.
Enemies and weapons are blocky but again they look really good. You can tell what they were going for. They were going for a convincing look while staying true to the game’s blocky appearance.
So how does all of this blocky, high texture, and convincing look to weapons and enemies translate when it comes to performance. The answer to that question is that it performs amazingly well.
I was expecting the game to dip in FPS on my little mini PC but the FPS is solid with an average of 60FPS. Now I know some will say that 60FPS is nothing. Well for me, I am generally ok with a solid 30FPS on most games as FPS count is something that I really don’t care about. For me, I just need the game to be able to run and be at a playable 30FPs and I am good to go. So 60FPS was a nice surprise, especially when it comes to how good this game looks.
Transition from space to planet is nearly seamless with hardly any loading at all. The only time you’re going to notice is the slight dip in FPS or maybe the occasional stutter or hiccup in performance. Traversing the planet’s surface by foot or even by ship is surprisingly smooth when it comes to the scrolling landscape as you move across the planet.
The music in the game is about what I expected. It’s very atmospheric and is rather fun to listen to. There were times that I was just sitting at my base or in orbit of a planet and just listened to the in game music. It transitions between being environmentally nice to a hard hitting techno style soundtrack when you’re being attacked and getting into a heated battle for survival. When it comes to sound effects, those are really nice too. You have the hum of your engines and laser beam when it comes to mining. You have the sounds of fauna roaming around and plants rustling as you walk through them. Everything just fits so nicely in this game, it’s like you never want to leave.
Cubic Odyssey has so much going for it. It’s a lot of fun to play, gorgeous looking, and has some really amazing music. I found myself wanting to come back to it and play it for hours on end. It’s the kind of game that you can just get lost in. Which is really something I think the devs were going for. This is a game that you can start playing, and because it’s so good, you keep coming back time and time again, playing for hours at a time.
I am really shocked at how awesome this game is and I think that this is a really great game. If you’re a fan of Minecraft, No Man’s Sky, or any survival/block building game, you owe it to yourself to pick up this game and play it!
Disclaimer: A review key was provided
In addition to writing articles, Ryan Byers also creates content for his YouTube channel called "Obscure Games and Consoles", collects video games, and dabbles in video game development.