Let’s discover the strengths and weaknesses of this low budget production.
Despite some interesting premises to say the least, and a particularly tantalizing graphic side for a low-budget production, the Orange Cast Demo released in December was not surprising at all. From bugs to problems of all kinds, not to mention the poor optimization of PC, the developer or Rez Team has had much to work with , even if he decided to release the title only a month later. Unfortunately, the final result – already available on the Steam platformat a budget price – it greatly disappointed our expectations, proposing more defects than merits and easily burying all the magnificent premises that had created a magical aura around this production. We have had the opportunity to put our hands on Orange Cast and we have tried it thoroughly, so let’s find out all the details in the next lines.
Save the world of Orange Cast
As the most classic of plots, the protagonist plays a soldier who fights for the fate of the world , against hundreds of aliens who will be defeated from time to time until you reach the end credits. While the plot may seem trivial, with very few implications, it must be said that the developer has done everything to make this interesting. The low budget starts to make itself felt from here however, since – although there are not few dialogues and documents to analyze – not only the localization in Italian is completely absent, but the English translation has many gapsand it is particularly rough, and lacks any kind of dubbing other than Russian. Digging into the game lore therefore ends up being tedious, and the information learned does not make the world of Orange Cast interesting enough to move forward, especially considering that some dialogue shows up during fights , and therefore cannot be read easily.
The fights then, which could have saved the production making it memorable, are the lowest point of Orange Cast. Although from the trailers it may seem a really exciting and fun game, the gameplay pad in hand (or rather, mouse and keyboard) is extremely woody and frustrating . The third-person shooting system is nothing short of rudimentary, and it is really difficult to interface with the various weapons to defeat the enemies, even for those who have experience with similar experiences and weapons dedicated to the Sci-Fi theme. Rolling and juggling scenarios is complex, taking away the fun and smoothness that should characterize shooters without a tactical streak like Orange Cast. Even simple gunplay isn’t satisfying., the more inaccurate and tedious. The types of weapons and enemies differ in a positive way, perfect for this Sci-Fi setting.
Work to be finished
Unfortunately, the production fails to surprise even on the graphic front. In themselves the models are really well made, perhaps thanks to the assets of Unreal Engine 4 , but the animations are also quite woody and the settings – although extremely varied and inspired – do not satisfy in the least. The bugs are many and several times some disabling problems may arise , which require you to restart entire sequences. The disastrous technical side is then also highlighted by the respawns, which completely recharge the life and equipment of the protagonist, which adds to the particularly unbalanced aspect where it is possible to save easily at any time, even in the middle of the fighting.
The graphic peculiarities then weigh in a not negligible way on the power of the computers. While the visual impact isn’t particularly great either, an RTX 2080Ti barely coped with the experience in maximum details , and framerate drops were more frequent than we could have imagined. The developer, even in this area, has probably aimed too high, failing to correctly calibrate the work and overshadowing the performance to improve the graphic side.
