Precursors

I went in expecting a bargain-bin curio and came out genuinely puzzled by how much the game had absorbed me before it had also annoyed me. Precursors is a first-person shooter RPG with a space-sim layer bolted on top, originally built by the small Kyiv studio Deep Shadows and re-released on Steam in 2017. It sits in the same DNA pool as Boiling Point and White Gold - games that aimed at an absurd level of scope and landed somewhere between ambitious and unfinished. The comparison that keeps coming to mind is Deus Ex crossed with Freelancer: you play as Treece Creighton, a young pilot of the Amarn race who starts by shooting plant monsters in a corridor-shaped jungle and gradually expands outward into a galaxy of factions, smuggler stations, and ancient mysteries tied to a vanished civilization called the Precursors. The structure that actually works here is the faction system. Seven groups - the Empire, the Democratic Union, the Free Traders, two rival Clatz factions, bandits, and civilians - each carry their own standing meter, and burning one relationship to build another has genuine downstream consequences. Most missions offer stealth routes or diplomatic resolutions if your faction rep is high enough, and the sidequests, of which there are a staggering number, frequently branch in ways you do not expect. The RPG loop is lean but purposeful: experience feeds a perk system that shapes whether you invest in combat, piloting, or trade, and the weapon variety ranges from conventional rifles to semi-auto crossbows and partially organic guns that need their ammunition literally bred between sessions. Managing weight limits, drug dependencies, and a medkit supply gives the inventory screen a satisfying sim crunchiness that players who enjoy STALKER-style resource pressure will recognise immediately. Once you get access to a spaceship, the game opens into space trade, dogfighting, and boarding actions - you can disable an enemy vessel, destroy its shield generator and engines, then teleport aboard for a room-to-room firefight. On the ground, the vehicle roster runs from buggies and flyers to hover tanks and mechanical robots. Six planets are explorable, each with distinct environments, and the day-night cycle with real-time weather adds a layer of atmosphere that the dated visuals cannot fully carry but do not entirely kill either. The lore around the ancient Precursor pyramids scattered across planets like Goldin and Reandore is the kind of worldbuilding I wanted more of - religious cults on one world, Imperial research labs cracking open alien tech on another. The bones of a genuinely interesting sci-fi setting are visible, even if the writing budget clearly ran out before the concept did. Now for the part that needs to be said plainly: this game is rough in ways that go beyond charm. The English localization has a patchy history - community unofficial patches (the Wesp5 patch lineage, still updated as of 2024) fix missing voice overs and broken quests that shipped in the base version, and installing them is strongly recommended before you start. Combat feel is clunky, enemy AI is inconsistent, and the opening hours throw you into firefights with limited feedback on damage or target priority. The story bible appears to have been partially redacted, with your protagonist's identity shifting depending on which NPC you talk to. Filler padding in mid-game travel is real, and the promise of dozens of planets collapses to six landable ones. Players who need a polished entry point will bounce off this fast. For a specific kind of player - someone who finished STALKER with a grin, who thinks the best RPG is one that drops you into a world and refuses to hold your hand, and who is willing to tolerate jank in exchange for genuine systemic depth - Precursors offers a loop that holds up well past the first few hours. The faction reputation system rewards patience, the build variety across combat, piloting, and trade skills creates meaningfully different runs, and the space boarding sequences are a mechanic I have not seen replicated anywhere else at this scale. It is not the space RPG that executes everything it promises. It is the one that promises the most interesting things and delivers maybe sixty percent of them, which in this genre is still more than nothing. Monika, Scout Team