Relic Odyssey has put me in sort of a weird place. To break the fourth wall this is my first review code. Up until this point I have happily just asked if I can review a game from my own catalog that I enjoyed. The only requirement is that it be somewhat recent. When I was sent the marketing material for the game and it was compared to Halo I actually got excited which later on turned out to be my bad.
Based on both the marketing material and the Steam page I had signed up for a test in my FPS and RPG skill. The Steam page for Relic Odyssey says, and I quote “Fight off disgusting beasts and enemies, drill for resources” but in the end what I fought off was boredom and frustration and what I drilled for was relief from my migraine.
How It Starts
The long and short of it is you’re on a planet called Valtar. You’ve been sent there along with Sarah to search for a team of Relic scouts that have lost contact with the Orion Archaeological Order. It appears the scouts sent a distress call right before they lost contact.
After crash landing on the planet you’re greeted by Sarah for the first time in one of the most obviously AI generated voices I’ve ever heard, with all the enthusiasm of a 90’s B-horror movie (spoiler alert, get used to this). Basically from this point your mission is to go to the dig site and figure out what’s going on. Once arriving you’ll discover dead bodies, random survivors, the same few enemies over and over and a cute little companion you have to repair named Clunky. When speaking to Clunky your character randomly makes mention of smugglers shooting down your ship. Glad he knew since I didn’t.
Relic Odyssey gets a bit murky story wise after that. I understand we are digging for relics and to get to the Xantao temple but the story as to why or how you know what you’re doing just sorta falls off here. I thought we were sent to find the scout team? Anyway as you adventure you’ll run across a broken drill rig you need to repair to start digging. When digging you’ll find an underground base of sorts full of the same enemies you see on the surface plus a few more. Good for you. Along the way you can farm resources to make new weapons, make ammo and basically all the other things you would be able to do in a game like that. Relic Odyssey doesn’t do a good job in making you want to though. There’s a boss encounter that’s basically one of the caterpillar looking enemies just bigger. I’ll admit there is a possibility I missed some key story points. The piss poor writing and terrible AI voice acting will only hold your attention for as long as you find them funny. Speaking of things it does terribly, lets get to the bugs.
Bugs?
Jesus. Okay where to start? First off that cute Clunky fellow was one of my more favorite aspects of the game. Little cute side kick. What’s not to love? Well when you find him he’s broken so you find the needed parts and fix him. Simple enough. After awhile, he gets beat up, his health bar goes down and you have to repair him again. One night I saved and quit shortly after this. Next night after work I booted the game back up and I can’t find him. He’s gone, but wait he’s not. He’s still talking to me and giving me advice and his health bar is three quarters full but he’s not there. I never did figure out a solution to this. Hopefully you like dealing with Ghost Clunky.
Relic Odyssey also has controller support, sorta. When loading your save file after selecting the load menu you can’t select the file with your controller. You have to use a mouse. This isn’t an issue in game, just at the start menu. Speaking of things you should be able to do with your controller if you can move the digging rig up with the controller I never figured out how. Again my trusty PC mouse and its scrolling wheel solved this issue.
Along with those there was the hitching, frame drops, flickers and stuttering. I’ve come to expect these from early access titles. Those things kind of come with the territory so they’re not worth getting super detailed about but be aware that they’re there and you’ll run into them.
Oddly there was only one single hard crash to report. You’ll notice all the screen shot’s for this article are on steam deck and it wasn’t because I preferred playing it there like with my Hauntii review. When I went to take my first screen shot it just crashed. Odd. so I rebooted the game. This seems to be an irregularity cause now the game just switches to windows when I try. I’m blaming the game cause this doesn’t happen in any other game I’ve taken screen shots with.
Steam deck
As of June 15th, 2024 Relic Odyssey is not rated as verified or playable on steam deck however, both the Twitter/X account for this game and the media kit I was given makes mention of them targeting steam deck so I think it’s fair game to criticize the performance. As you’d imagine I ran across a lot of the same things in the above section only worse.
If you dare to play this on deck please lock it at 30fps for your own sanity. You can get 60fps at times, mostly when looking away from busy areas but the frame rate will bounce between 25-60 fps when you’re not and when in combat. Calling this jarring is an understatement.
The stuttering and hitching I barely made mention of earlier is multiplied on the steam deck. Lowering the frame cap can help keep this minimal but it isn’t going to get rid of it. I had a moment on deck where there were too many enemies on screen and it drug it down to single digit FPS. Given that they are targeting the Steam Deck even in early access I expected it to be a bit more stable then this.
On the plus side there were no issues taking screen shots on the Steam Deck and the controller issues I made mention of on my PC in the load menu was easily worked around with the touch screen. I can’t say if the dig rig has any issues going up or down with the steam deck. You can emulate mouse input on deck. I didn’t make it far enough to test this and there’s no cloud save support for the game.
Conclusion
Relic Odyssey is in early access which is important to note. What is also worth noting is the bug section and Steam Deck section of this review which may as well be one, given all the issues I had make up a large chunk of the review. I’m running a Nvidia 2080ti graphics card on my PC which is by no means new but even a user on steam with the name goose claimed to run this game with a 4070ti and described the game as an assault on his eyes so I don’t think you’ll be able to brute force your way out of the issues with this game.
As far as a score goes I’ve seen a few comments from the developers saying there going to fix the bugs and replace the AI voices with humans. I can’t review what doesn’t exist yet. What does exist is a variety of bugs, glitches, terrible writing, and atrocious AI both in voice acting and combat which all together earn this game a 3 out of 10.
I’d like to thank Honour Bound Games Studios inc. for providing the review code. Should you feel the need to check out the game you can do so at the link here
https://game.page/relicodyssey/Gamer%20Social%20Club
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