Beyond Contact

by Aethyna May 13, 2023 | 1 Votes | 62 Played | 0 Reviews

9 rate

Genres:

Adventure

Graphics:

Labels:

Survival , Open World , Futuristic Setting , Sci-Fi , Crafting , Aliens

Platforms:

Publishers:

Deep Silver Beyond Contact is a sandbox-based survival-themed base-building game where you play as one of the survivors of a rescue mission gone wrong. Explore a sprawling alien landscape filled with diverse flora and fauna as well as various dangers as you try to track down the last known position of your other surviving crew members. Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Plotline Gameplay Community Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

Beyond Contact is a semi-open world, sandbox-based survival-themed base-building game where you play as one of the survivors of a planetwide rescue mission gone wrong. Explore a sprawling alien landscape filled with diverse flora and fauna as well as various dangers as you try to track down the last known position of your other surviving crew members. Will you be able to make it?

Plotline

There are three unique characters for you to play as in this game, with one more being scheduled for later release. However, they do not really change how the story goes, perhaps only small, insignificant dialogues that may touch upon their respective talents.

In this game, you are one of the crew members aboard the research vessel, the Aurelius. Although your team isn’t exactly “rescue mission” material, you all are the closest expedition to Ketern, a planet that’s literally being torn apart by a mysterious energy source that’s spawning an onslaught of dark rifts. The UWC has already sent a rescue team over to help evacuate the inhabitants of the planet, but they themselves seem to have encountered quite a bit of problem, resulting in a distress call being sent out… and well, this is where your team comes in!

However, unknown to UWC or your team, Ketern’s orbit is no longer safe for any kind of spaceship. Once Aurelius made the jump into Ketern’s orbit, she found herself being dragged towards the fragmenting planet. Needless to say, you ended up in one of the escape pods and survive the crash, despite landing quite a way away from the rest of your surviving crew.

It’s time to rely on your wits as you traverse the alien planet in hopes of finding your team and possibly figure out what happened on Ketern.

Gameplay

Before you start, you’ll be given the option to play either the Story or Conquest mode. Story mode is essentially the campaign of the game, while Conquest mode is designed to offer plenty of replayability value to the player, giving them a chance to really test their survival skills in an epic race against time against the rapidly-spreading corruption. Each mode also comes with several difficulty levels for you to choose from.

You’ll also get to choose one out of the three characters available, though only the first, Quinn, is free to use. For the other two, you’ll need to first unlock them by spending credits earned by completing Dailies. Each character has their respective set of unique talents, specifically tailoring them to cater to certain playstyles. However, if you prefer someone who’s more well-rounded, Quinn the Science Officer is likely your best bet. Note that the developers have promised a fourth character that will be released after the game has launched, but no real timeline has been given as to when this new character will drop or what talents he or she will have.

In terms of gameplay, if you’ve played any other survival games like Don’t Starve, you should feel right at home here, albeit it's vastly different theme. You’ll start off from the crash site, scavenging whatever you can while harvesting local alien flora to help with your survival efforts.

Thankfully, you won’t be doing all of this alone – you’ll have your trusty AI companion, your C.A.R.L. unit, who will guide you in your journey as well as a helpful wrist scanner that can quickly and accurately scan various alien flora, fauna, and minerals, giving you a breakdown of how you can use them to craft the stuff that you may need to survive.

This is further supplemented by the game’s incredibly detailed, neon-lit map, where every little resource, including possible hostile creatures, is marked. Besides being able to track various objects on the map and set custom waypoints, you’ll even get to see the status of say… a plant that you’ve harvested a while back, to see if you should return to it to harvest some more.

Although you can already gather quite a bit of material from your environment right from the get-go, you’ll really get to collect and subsequently craft better tools and items once you have at least your explorer’s pick, which will allow you to mine for resin and Feron ore. You’ll also eventually be able to craft a shovel, which will give allow you to dig up soil patches or local plants to relocate them. Note that items here have durability and will wear out with use.

Due to the rather large number of items that you can collect in this game, the inventory you start off with can be a bit limited. Even with backpacks unlocked (at least the starter one), you’ll only get four more slots, which frankly speaking, may not help as much for someone who likes to hoard resources… like me. This is why it’s important to only gather the stuff you really need first and come back for the rest once you’ve identified the place you want to build your first base on.

Once you have a place to call “home”, you can then fill it up with storage boxes, each housing up to 6 different items, so you can really stock up on stuff. However, do take note that some items, particularly biological ones, do degrade over time in this game, so for those, there might not be much of a point to stock up too much of them.

To unlock new tools and equipment, the game provides you with an incredibly detailed technology tree that’s split into various sub-categories, ranging from Exploration to Habitat. You see, everything you collect in this game, be it ores, fruits, or in rare cases, valuable crystals, will also produce their corresponding data, which you’ll then invest into researching the technology you need.

As you improve your Research Chip, you’ll even unlock better research that yields more powerful tools and equipment, potentially unlocking new areas for you to explore; areas that were previously too hazardous for you before, such as the cold winter wastelands or the spore-filled areas, or even allowing you to live in comfort in your base, complete with heating and oxygen supply.

A quick segway to point out that the base-building aspect in Beyond Contact is very well made. The entire process of setting up a starter base in my playthrough is easy and very intuitive. The game will immediately show where something can be placed via a simple color-coded grid, with blue indicating available placement locations and red indicating the opposite of that. Base defense is another important aspect of the game, though it’s only important once you’ve reached a certain point in the game.

I love that you can set up your own farms too, either by producing your own sprouts from local “fruits” you’ve gathered and processed via your Botany Laboratory or by simply uprooting the plants you want and replanting them in neat rows near to your base. Technically, you can even set up animal farms by capturing and releasing the local fauna, mostly the tamer ones, into enclosures you’ve built, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a point in setting one up since they do not reproduce in captivity. So, it’ll end up more like a zoo than a farm in this case.

Besides research, progression in this game is also measured by your character level. Your character will earn some experience points for everything he/she does, and once you have enough, you’ll then level up. Leveling up comes with a free skill point which you can then invest into the character’s skill tree, unlocking new skills that offer invaluable perks to make surviving or resource-gathering a lot easier. The skills are segmented into tiers with each tier being gated behind a level threshold. So, what this means is that you can invest in a skill located in the topmost tier if you haven’t reached the level needed to unlock said tier in the first place.

As a survival game, there are many survival aspects that you’ll need to take note of in Beyond Contact if you don’t want to die. Besides the usual food, which will restore stamina that you’ll need to do... well, practically anything in this game, you’ll also need to replenish your supply of oxygen since the air on Ketern is poisonous to humans. Thankfully, there are at least two ways to do so, the main one being extracting oxygen from various oxygen vents that are scattered across the planet. There are even oxygen-containing air sacs that are produced by certain local flora that you can tap into for emergency oxygen.

Once you start encountering more hostile local fauna, you may find yourself in need of a patch-me-up. There are several ways you can do so here in Beyond Contact. In addition to the medigels that you can scavenge from random Aurelius wrecks scattered across the planet, you can also craft them once you’ve completed the necessary research. There’s also a local seed that can surprisingly restore small amounts of health when consumed.

Due to being literally torn apart, the planet has some pretty harsh environments a.k.a. biomes that you’ll eventually encounter in your exploration. The main one is the bitter extreme cold that will envelop the place once night falls or during a solar eclipse. You’ll need to have a thermo stick at hand, or at least have the resources to craft one quickly, to keep the cold and darkness at bay. But as you progress, you’ll be able to craft a special helmet that can offer you both warmth and light.

Some environments may also need specialized equipment before you can really head into them to explore since the basic protective gear you have on, won’t last too long against the hazards you’ll be up against.

As fun as Beyond Contact is, the game might not be for everyone. The game leans heavily on its resource gathering and management aspect, forcing you to go out, search for, and collect resources 80% of the time. Even with farms you’ve set up, there’s no automation to help so you’ll still need to fertilize and harvest your plants manually. Imagine doing that for every possible plant in the game! Plus, I do have to point out that the game doesn’t have a button to let you simply collect every resource that was dropped around you, after mining a Feron node for instance. This Quality-of-Life feature should definitely be added to the game, just to make the resource grind a lot more palatable.

Some players have also voiced their frustration over the game’s overly simplistic combat system. You see, in this game, you don’t get to dodge or block enemy attacks. All you can do to avoid getting hit is by running away, kiting the enemy for a bit, and then coming back to squeeze in a hit or two. Personally, this isn’t really a huge issue in my books, but this is worth noting for players who are looking for something more.

Community

Like Don’t Starve, it’s definitely a lot more fun to survive with your friends in Beyond Contact. The game comes with a co-op mode where each player can choose one of the three characters to play as. Not only will you be able to explore the world together, but you’ll also get to take on various corrupted creatures, complete shared objectives and research, and even revive a fallen teammate if someone happens to fall.

Graphics/ Sound

Beyond Contact features a top-down-like view of the game’s 3D world that is quite unique within the survival genre. This allows you to see quite a bit ahead so you won’t accidentally stumble into an Urchin lair, for instance, as you make your way through dense foliage of the alien jungle.

Due to its sci-fi-theme, the game comes with a selection of techno-inspired tunes that work great as background music. During combat, the music changes to something more upbeat, giving you that spike in adrenaline. Beyond Contact also has voice acting for its characters and cutscenes. Your character and C.A.R.L. may occasionally provide some helpful quips as you encounter new resources, environments, or creatures.

Conclusion

Beyond Contact is a solid, albeit grindy, sandbox-based survival-themed base-building game with a massive world to explore, plenty to research and craft, and a story worth following through to the end. Plus, the game supports co-op too, which is always fun with the right people!

New Game Added: Beyond Contact

by Aethyna May 13, 2023

Beyond Contact is a sandbox-based survival-themed base-building game where you play as one of the survivors of a rescue mission gone wrong. Explore a sprawling alien landscape filled with diverse flora and fauna as well as various dangers as you try to track down the last known position of your other surviving crew members.