In a long-format strategic game, the little issues and snags stack up quick. Some RPGs may have a UI problem, but it’s something players can get used to; similarly, if an otherwise excellent brawler has some goofy or nonsensical bits of narrative, they can become charming if the gameplay holds up. With the new console port of the sci-fi tactical RPG Element Space to the PlayStation 4, the little problems overwhelm the full package, and that’s before the unexpected bugs appear, ready to completely ruin a run and send you back to the dashboard, stunned. With a forgettable soundtrack and inconsistent visuals, the basic gameplay in action needs to be rock solid to carry this title, but it fails on launch.

The year is 2199 and Captain Christopher Pietham is embroiled in a secret galactic mission, one which is unfortunately timed at the brink of a crucial peace summit gone awry. He’ll need to amass a group of political allies and squad conscripts to help sway the tide in favor of the peace-oriented while squaring off against members of a mysterious terrorist group named Tempest.

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Some games port better than others, where Element Space shoehorns in a quick and dirty adaptation to the PS4 controller, and it’s no less than a disaster. In-battle, you’ll be dancing the cursor around the screen with the left analog stick, trying to obtain ideal camera angles to determine the right action, none of which will look right. There’s a half-baked tooltip scheme which tries to give you important information about enemies, their status effects, and other points of interest, but this text bleeds out of view or leaves out crucial information as the camera drunkenly lunges. Don’t forget the enormous blue cursor, which likes to pop up and remain on the screen when it’s unusable. All this is basically demonstrating a shoddy, quick-to-market console port.

Element Space Review Office Space

Outside of the UI, Element Space carries an enormous amount of fat that could have been easily cut to help maintain any sense of flow (and that’s before we get to discussing the actual bugs). Instead of merely serving up battles, there are exploration/navigation interludes for every specific mission. Land somewhere, listen to dialogue, then walk through completely empty areas until the game decides you’ve triggered the next battle. There’s no tactical basis for the exploration—one nice touch could have been positioning your units smartly before the enemy shows up—no NPCs to talk to outside of the cutscenes, and no items or secrets to trip over. It’s just padding in between the fights and, considering the subpar visual design, animation, and general lack of detail, this gameplay aspect has no business being here.

Furthermore, none of the dialogue can ever be skipped or sped through, which is essentially unforgivable in 2020, but here’s the worse part: certain dialogue options can change the flow and outcome of the story, and those can be rushed through by mistake. All of the dialogue is spoken but the acting is of average quality, to put it gently. There are no hilariously bad performances (players may recall that even Disco Elysium had a few of those), but none of it is memorable or distinguishable at all. A nicely diverse range of cultures are present and accounted for throughout, which is admirable, although the main protagonist is as white-bread, occasional-sarcasm-serving-as-charm, stock-character dud as you’ve ever seen.

All that being said, there does exist some actual meat under those side dishes if you dig down deep enough. Element Space’s fights always put you on the back foot but also equip you with plenty of options and methods of approach. Characters have upgradeable active and passive skills, many of which play into the dual-sided action point system. Basically, you usually have one primary point and one secondary point, with the former being used for actions like firing a weapon or hacking a turret. Secondary points feed into movement, which means that most characters can both attack and re-position in the same round, and the same goes for enemies.

Element Space Review Combat

Flanking is the name of the game, and characters can also engage an “overwatch” ability, straight out of XCOM 2, which automatically fires on an enemy moving within a vision cone. Once skills are upgraded and additional teammates join the squad, individual fights can play out in many different ways. Melee-based characters, for example, nicely break up the enemy AI’s often meticulous turtling and flanking, and it can be engaging to theory-craft which party member would have been best for a given mission. If the line-of-sight systems—arguably sacred to tactics-based games—weren’t so unclear and inconsistent, seemingly changing with the wind and never adequately shown prior to attack, you might even call the combat “good.”

Despite the exploration between fights in a single mission, you cannot heal, swap weapons, or change out party members once a mission has been engaged. Mission intel is always minimal, so the only way to anticipate the coming battles is to go ahead and attempt one. Considering that players are given limited continues and retries, this seems irrationally cruel, extending the amount of time it may take to get through the full game successfully. There’s a great post-battle and post-mission evaluation screen that shows you turn estimates and combat achievements but, with no ability to quicksave during combat, it’s doubtful that you’d actually restart a mission to reattempt a perfect score on its third battle.

Then there are bugs. Characters hovering to the far corners of the combat area after an attack, long visual stutters prior to an enemy dying, disappearing tooltips, delayed damage manifesting on health bars, and uncomfortably long load times. There are also disastrous game crashes, which will actually disrupt a mission and send you back to your ship upon reloading the game. Yes, that means you have to start the entire hour-plus long mission again, so pray that theses crash don’t occur thirty minutes in. You’d have to be loving this game to weather more than one restart like that.

Element Space Review Zero

While Element Space’s narrative isn’t the absolute peak of the genre, it is above-average. The factions are differentiated, the world-building shows some thought, and the pacing of the story is brisk and engaging on its own. And yet, when you factor in the length of the missions, the snail’s pace of the unskippable dialogue and exploration, and the fact that a crash could mean sitting through all of those again, any sense of pacing vanishes. It feels like the individual parts of Element Space tear the whole to shreds, things that a simple patch might not be able to fix on its own. The combat could be excellent if it were genuinely readable and the narrative would be decent if you could consume it at your own speed. With so many top-shelf tactics games available to play, it would be impossible to recommend this one as-is.

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Element Space is priced at $24.99, and is available digitally on Steam for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. A digital PlayStation 4 copy was provided to Screen Rant, for purposes of review.