I'm Seth Walker, and I'm having a bad day. It's so bad, it's probably a Thursday.

Things were going well, after all. Humanity had invented a faster than light drive. We had cybernetic implants, and cool robots. Then we sent people out to the stars to colonize and preserve our species.

And that's when things went wrong. And by "things" I mean the Kerak.

They didn't like that we were colonizing one of their planets, so they killed all the colonists. And then they tracked them back home, and decided to destroy the Earth, too. Completionists, these Kerak. Gotta kill 'em all.

Well, the colonizing idea didn't work really well, but we had these five ships laying around and the ISCS — a military-based space agency and earth defense force — decides to send those five ships out. I'm even on one of them, which is good because the aliens destroy the Earth right after the launch. Then they destroy the other four ships and attack mine.

That's when my day gets particularly bad.

It's okay, though, PILOT — the ship's AI and, well, pilot — has a plan. Everyone in coldsleep and he'll gas the aliens to death. I helped some people get situated, killed a few aliens, and got into coldsleep.

When I woke up, seven and a half weeks later, things are pretty bad. There are still aliens; PILOT is offline; and I didn't have any guns.

With the exception of a brief tutorial, this is where the game begins. Seth does have some sort of integrated melee weapon, which works reasonably well. There's also got some armor and some health packs. My first quest is to find the missing guns, and to move through the area discovering what is going on. Space Siege is an action RPG, rendered in isometric 3D. You click to move, and right-click to attack, and aliens die.

You get a variety of weapons to do this with. Integrated melee swords are only the beginning. You get pistols, shotguns, sonic blasters, things that shoot bullets that set the enemy on fire, things that shoot electricity. You eventually pick up all manner of grenades, land mines and turrets.

As Seth is an engineer and can use the upgrade parts that are the only kind of loot dropped by enemies to do just about anything from upgrading your weapons and armor to making grenades and health packs. You are also able to repair an HR-V unit (or "Harvey") to act as a sidekick/pet that you reasonably control — but which acts fairly well autonomously. Harvey also has a selection of upgradeable weapons, armor and health.

The workbenches where this occurs also contain check/save points which heal both you and Harvey, and exist fairly commonly. There are usually two or three on a level. When you are killed, you are moved back to the most recent save point and healed. Resummoning Harvey requires spending a few upgrade parts at a "manufactory" which is usually — but not always — outside of one of the Health Module/Save Rooms.

How and when you upgrade your weapons and sidekick are half of the major decisions in the game. The other two, which are somewhat integrated, involve Cybernetic parts and skill points. Skill points are awarded for achieving major objectives, usually the completion of a level. These can be spent in a tree to garner benefits like a better critical, health regeneration, or to improve the way that Harvey works.

Cybernetic parts, like the majority of weapons in the game, are optional quests. Installing them reduces your humanity, but opens up some of the skills on the skill tree. There's also a skill that's only available near endgame if you have not installed cybernetic parts at all (or just one). This choice affects the way some of the characters react to you, and the way that combat works.

Looking through the skill tree it seems that there are interesting choices here, and that there are three or four ways to traverse the skill tree and get to interesting, potentially effective combat options. Between the skill tree and the upgrade options it seems that Space Siege has quite a lot of interesting depth, to allow for complicated and strategic combat.

There are, however, several reasons why this doesn't work in practice. My first issue was that the game was sluggish. My system met the minimum specs, and except for the graphics card (which fell between minimum and recommended specs), met or exceeded the recommended specs for the game. Still, option windows opened slowly, and the mouse wasn't responsive enough to support multiple options.

You could have two weapons equipped, and toggling between them was a quick key press. Accessing the other weapons, however, entangled you in the slow opening of the weapons selection menu, all while being pounded on by enemies. This is one of the few menus which didn't pause the game — so one of the few where the sluggishness of the interface actually affected the game itself. It's understandable why they didn't go for number keys to switch weapons, as those were tasked to the many abilities you had (and the function keys were for commanding Harvey).

This forced me into a much simpler strategy of having one long ranged weapon, and one which did more damage at a shorter range. This wasn't optimal for the game, but was still successful due to the prevalence of the healing checkpoints. As enemies didn't have my access to healing, they remained damaged, and I could just run back to them and fight.

This certainly relieves a lot of the frustration of the game, but their presence undermines all the interesting choices available. The appeal of the cybernetic parts is largely in the better abilities they open up in the skill tree. If the skill tree doesn't matter, then the choice of whether or not to use the cybernetics becomes trivial, which in turn makes what seems to be the game's central question about humanity also a pointless choice.

While Space Siege is technically competent — I only had one issue that really harmed my gameplay — it never rises to the level it promises. It fails to excite, and offers most of what it is about in the first couple of hours. After that, the game just becomes repetitive. Space Seige is currently selling for around $15, which might be enough for a few hours of fun, but that's all this game really has to offer.