Space Overlords

My instincts usually push me toward the underdog, and a small Colombian studio building a giant-monster city-smasher from scratch is exactly the kind of origin story I want to root for. But honesty is part of the job, and Space Overlords is a game where good intentions collide hard with execution problems that were flagged at launch and never meaningfully fixed. The pitch is a Rampage-style action game wearing a sci-fi revenge story. You pick one of four ancient beings called Overlords, each with genuinely distinct mechanics on paper: Terbang floats and fires projectiles, Phemus is a slow four-armed bruiser with a sustained power beam, Beruk spins through crowds in a mowing arc, and Kebak delivers a massive beam special capable of clearing screens. The character designs are visually distinct, with different body shapes and color palettes, and the 56 story mode levels span seven galaxies worth of planetary destruction. There is also a planet editor, a PVP multiplayer mode for up to four players, and a combo system that awards points for consecutive hits on buildings, inhabitants, and enemy ships. On paper, that content list sounds like a fair trade for the low price point. In practice, the core loop collapses fast. The controls carry a noticeable lag between input and response, so lining up a hit on a building requires you to think several frames ahead. Hit detection compounds this by being wildly inconsistent, occasionally letting you strike a turret from across the map and just as often refusing a hit when you are standing directly on top of it. The overlords themselves, despite being cast as cosmic-scale destroyers, feel weak and sluggish rather than powerful. There is no screen shake, no satisfying crunch, almost no audio-visual feedback to make destruction feel like destruction. That absence of game-feel is the deeper wound here. Even an arcade-simple game survives on moment-to-moment satisfaction, and Space Overlords drains it away almost immediately. The load times pile on further: between levels, on death, and from the main menu, waiting measured in minutes rather than seconds becomes the defining texture of the experience. There is also only one save slot, which is the kind of small decision that lands badly when players discover it by accident after hours of progress. A few things do work. The electronic soundtrack is genuinely energetic, the kind of fast-paced score that deserved a better game underneath it. The opening cinematic uses well-drawn illustrated panels to set up the lore of the Thuan Bhesaryth and their imprisonment by the villain Kesedihan, and it shows real craft in a limited medium. The planet editor is described by reviewers as intuitive and functional, a bright spot in otherwise troubled technical territory. Local co-op also exists for anyone who wants to share the sofa. For the specific audience of someone who exhausted every Rampage title years ago and wants anything that scratches that itch, Space Overlords exists. But the mechanical problems are real, the repetition sets in fast, and the load times actively work against replaying levels or trying different characters. For a game built around the fantasy of feeling like an unstoppable cosmic force, it spends too much time making you feel the opposite.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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