Voxel-based survival game Orebound has released its public demo recently, giving us a taste of what’s to come in this open world underground adventure.
Orebound is a Dwarven-themed automation game, where players are tasked with setting up factories and mass-producing items, all while fighting off orcs, goblins, and other fantasy creatures.
So, how does it stack up against the Dwarven mining classics like The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria and Deep Rock Galactic? Continue reading our preview of Orebound to find out!
Orebound starts off with the player being dropped off via airship onto a massive open world. Not many directions are given, but you start out with a few key pieces of equipment. The player is given a sword to defend themselves, a hammer capable of building structures, and a compass that can find ores, amongst other items.
Due to the game’s voxel-based nature, the player can essentially destroy anything and go anywhere into the world, so the natural first step is to break everything you can for resources, establish a base, and dig around for ores, except that part is not relevant for too long.
It’s easy to believe that you should rely on your compass to find ore deposits and mine away while establishing your base, when in reality you are wasting your time, because the surface stops being a part of the game very early on.
As it turns out, the underground is infinitely more relevant than the above world, so the first real point of progression happens when the player starts digging down until they hit a cave, or stumble upon one through exploration, which may feel counterintuitive thanks to the game’s lack of direction.
The fact that the caves are filled with goblins and orcs may feel like an indication that you shouldn’t be in there that early into the game, but the sword’s deceptively long range and a little bit of kiting will deal with enemies just fine. It’s unknown if the enemies are meant as progression blockers or simply to be pushovers.
After digging around, unlocking a few basic tools, and completing quests, the player will be throttled by high gold costs on their next unlocks, which means that it’s time to establish a factory if you haven’t already.
When it comes to establishing factories, the player is given a decent amount of building tools. It’s relatively easy to snap structures together, and there are multiple build modes so you can get things just right. The only issue is making the ground flat, which is almost impossible.
The player is given access to explosives very early, but they blow up in a circular area, creating craters, and the shovel seems to have a mind of its own when it comes to aligning the terrain properly. This makes building factories a little messy, and it’s not as satisfactory to see your buildings on different levels scattered unevenly.
The cave systems in Orebound also make it really difficult to actually get a factory going in one place. On top of having resources distant from each other, you also have to deal with the fact that they may be far apart, separated by a mass of cave walls. They might also be in a different cave, or in a completely different elevations from where you set up.
Trying to clear the way with explosives is especially aggravating because they range from pitifully small to nuclear blasts, with no decent in-between, so there’s a good chance you’ll make a lava-filled crater instead of the corridor you planned. One of the explosives is called a mountain vaporizer, and while it is fun that players are given that kind of tool to mess around with, they don’t serve a functional purpose, unless you want to melt half of your map away.
The player is faced with conflicting issues when expanding their factory. One one hand, resources far from each other would imply you have to establish multiple factories, rather than a single one, but on the other hand, every factory is dependent on a coal deposit, which might not be close to your desired mining spot.
What this does is that it leads to a lot of back and forth manual work, which feels like the opposite of what the game is trying to achieve with its automation purpose. Hunkering down and wiping a place of its resources is very satisfying, but copper and iron won’t sustain you forever.
The game’s automation in general has so many steps that it almost doesn’t seem worth it, to the point where it feels more reasonable to just mine ores by hand and smelt them in the regular tier 1 furnace, because the alternative is to build a set of eight machines and containers tied to a coal deposit to achieve the same purpose.
The solution that seems to work the best is to simply run conveyor belts out of your desired coal deposit to your other mini factories, creating a complex underground network of sliding ores. It’s not an elegant solution by any means, but it does the job well.
What’s aggravating is that most upgrade tiers don’t come with anything really exciting, only new materials that you use to make new machines so you can mine more ores. The game does the ore progression thing well, but there don’t seem to be any actual rewards for the player, like new equipment, to make it worth doing, almost feeling like automation for automation’s sake.
Overall, Orebound is hurt by its tedious beginning and a slight lack of direction. The game picks up in pace once the player unlocks the automation machines and can get to work, but it still fails to provide the carrot on a stick for new research tiers and materials.
The game’s combat system is also very disappointing, as it mostly consists of kiting enemies and staying out of their range. Some sort of shield or defensive option would be good to make it feel like you are actually engaging with the enemies rather than cheesing their AI.
The game is also slightly lacking in quality of life features, like not being able to pick up items from storage containers unless your inventory is open. These minor issues stack up and make Orebound rough to play at the moment, but the game does have a solid foundation that can be worked on to make a fun automation experience, it simply needs more time in the oven.
