Sometimes I set out to review a game and things just don’t work out. Last month I was given the opportunity to check out Insomnia: The Ark, a new sci-fi RPG from Mono Studio. After playing through Finding Light, I was ready for something more modern, more action-packed. I hoped Insomnia: The Ark would sate my thirst for excitement.
It did not.
I was looking forward to trying out Insomnia: The Ark since their PR company reached out to me. As a fan of the Bioshock games, I was really into Insomnia’s dieselpunk style and it’s grim, futuristic setting. I scanned through the screenshots and found myself curious about the world I was peering into. I was intrigued just through screenshots. That’s always a good sign.
Eager to find out what the game was all about, I set aside some time for it and did my best to get into the game. But the game kept letting me down and I could only give the game so many benefits of the doubt before I had to throw in the towel.
Insomnia: The Ark is a third-person action RPG set in the far future. It’s a weird-looking far future where the technology is futuristic, but everything is stylized like it’s the middle of the 20th century. The game begins with a prelude that I’m still scratching my head about, but the opening of the game did a decent enough job teaching me the basic mechanics of the game without being overwhelming.
I was quickly disappointed to discover that, as much as I wanted to, I could not freely look around in the game. I couldn’t even look up or down. The camera is locked on the back of the main character like a GoPro. This…complicates things. Primarily it makes aiming your guns feel like they’re attached to a see-saw. You can move your aiming reticle a little up and a little down, but you have to move your entire body to aim to the left or right. This way of handling my character was jarring at first, but I did get used to it in time. The enemies I shot at were always right there in front of me, so I never had to worry about being shot at from upper-story windows or catwalks since it would have been impossible to shoot back at an elevated target.
Another problem I encountered was that when you do ascend to a new area, you have no idea what awaits you at the top of the staircase. Just look at this screenshot I took. That is as high up as the camera goes. There is no reason that a third-person game has such a restrictive camera pitch.
The restrictive camera makes it impossible to know what is at the top of staircases.
Because the enemies were forced to be grounded in front of me, combat was never very interesting. There was one point in the game where I was supposed to sneak by a checkpoint, but I messed up. A big armored, Iron Man-looking dude strutted out ready to kick my butt. I noticed that, similar to me, the enemy soldier was also unable to attack unless he was facing straight at me. Being slightly faster, I was able to literally run in a circle around the armored soldier, as the A.I. continually struggled to re-position for an attack. I took him down with a mere melee weapon, stopping only to attack when I was directly behind him.
The A.I. failed to impress. Even the limited, choice-based conversations were dull. I’d choose the smartass-type answer and the game would play out that little interaction, but then my character apologized and went with the choice the game wanted me to go with. The illusion of agency dissolved very quickly.
Ignoring the simple-minded enemies and stiff narrative, I pushed onward into the story. The universe that the story took place in was still intriguing to me. I wanted to believe that the beginning was just rough because I was still learning things. Unfortunately my experience with the game continued to disappoint.
My map was written in Russian, making navigating the game very annoying. I had no idea what I was looking at. At one point I did something that warranted an achievement unlocking. The game notified me with a slowly pulsating notification that an achievement was unlocked. No matter what I did (I even restarted the game) the notification continued to pulsate on my screen. It never went away. The audio would also glitch out regularly. Sounds would repeat over and over for a few seconds, or just cut-out midway through the audio clip playing. The cinematic moment at the end of the prelude was ruined for me because the ambient noise from the level continued to play over the sounds of the cinematic.
Insomnia: The Ark was a mess.
I gave up on playing the game, to my chagrin. Maybe there will be a major update in the future and I’ll come back to it and give it another try. I wanted Insomnia to be something great. I did not expect the next Bioshock, but I expected a better product than what I was forcing myself through for the sake of experiencing as much as I could stomach. I took one for the team so you don’t have to.
