Grand Emprise: Time Travel Survival

As I was playing Grand Emprise, I couldn't figure out if I liked or disliked it. I think I liked it, but I'm still not entirely sure. It is a strange game. It is, mostly, a survival crafting game. You gather materials to make various items to help you survive or thrive. As a bonus, you get a time manipulation device that let's you travel between different points in time at will.

You start off in the age of dinosaurs, collect some stuff to upgrade the time device and teleport away. Every once in a while, you get teleported to an arena of sorts where you fight a group of enemies or a single enemy that the game calls a boss. I found two slightly more difficult enemies than the average mob. I guess those were the boss fights.

The game seems similar to Ark, but only in the mixture of dinosaurs with advanced technology. If you liked Ark, you'd probably enjoy a bit of this game. It does not suffer from the constant grind and XP-chasing you get with Ark. That's both a good thing and bad. The game seems almost non-interactive as far as a story. Other than the specific location where you place items, I imagine most people will experience the game in an almost identical way.

The crafting feels pretty intuitive. You collect the items available to collect and then make higher tier items. The genre of the game shifts at points. At one point, you ride a dinosaur around and perform lunge attacks at other dinosaurs for their meat and hides. At another point you are building a village and your item crafting is now done by villagers. Then, you automate everything in another zone and begin collecting resources to create a hot air balloon. Then you use those resources to create a giant ship and drive it into a whirlpool that teleports you to the center of the ice age world where you can gather materials to your hearts content. You can fly an airplane around for some reason as well. A little later you are riding a mech and smashing up other mechs to collect an item in order to build a spaceship on the moon. You use what amounts to magic and siphon resources from the moon and energy from the sun and then you fly your spaceship to another planet, somehow find an AI and that AI somehow allows you to travel into a black hole. Then, the game ends.

I'm still conflicted about the entire game. I applaud the solo developer. It is fun and sort of tries to do everything. It doesn't do anything all that well, though. The game is poorly optimized. The combat is lackluster. There is a dodge mechanic that works really well against some enemies and not at all against others. You gain a set of leather armor and eventually that upgrades into a spacesuit. The resources in the world are spread throughout time periods so you spend more time traveling back and forth between eras than actually making progress. Still, considering it's a fairly short game by a single developer, it was fun enough.

Apparently I spent much more time completing this game than the average player. I treated the game as a survival game with action game mechanics on the side. I think if you treated the game as an action game with a survival game aesthetic, you might get through the game faster. Some of the items required a decent grind to get. It was never particularly difficult but it was a bit of a time sink. You are slowly introduced to automation mechanics but it seems like rushing through the game as fast as possible is the preferred method of playing.

Give it a shot. It's not great, but for a solo dev it is pretty impressive. As a note, this is the development equivalent of kitbashing for movie special effects. The dev saw all the toys in the asset store and smashed them together in order to make a somewhat coherent sequence of events. You travel to the age of the dinosaurs, prehistory with cavemen, a Roman colosseum, a desert area complete with sand worms, ancient Egypt, a natural history museum, an ancient temple, the ice age, an 1800's industrial desert landscape, a medieval castle, the polar ice caps, an underground diamond mine, the moon, some kind of asteroid or planet, you build a Dyson sphere around the sun, and eventually you enter a black hole. I'm sure there are others I've forgotten. It's a lot to take in.

There are a lot of animals. They prove more an annoyance than a gameplay element. There are not very many people though. And they are also more of an annoyance. There are a handful of violent cavemen in prehistory, friendly and enemy villagers in the ice age, angry knights in the medieval castle, angry gladiators in the colosseum, and a dozen or so angry mechs in post-apocalyptic future earth. Once you begin automating, the village you create in the ice age is irrelevant, along with any of the people.

If you are looking for a good story, look elsewhere. There's no real narrative except at the very beginning when you get the time travel device. After that you are on your own. The quests and narrative information are relayed on the technology screen. Occasionally you will get a yellow marker telling you where specific resources or points of interest are.

Even now, I'm still not sure if I liked the game. It's fine, I guess.

It is not a sandbox. But it is a decent survival game. It is very minimum viable product but it is viable it is playable and the bugs are few and far between. I would say it is worth the $5ish bucks i paid for it when it was on sale but definitely not worth full price. Reminds me of some of the games from the 90s

Such a cool little game, it really brings back the 2010's era of gaming vibe to it, teleport through eras to achieve things for your base in a linear progression. Simple, but the gameplay loop gets fun quickly and it's stable even on my potato of a computer. You can still tell the dev is working on it because some controls are a little rough and it's lacking progression for things like armor - but it's completely playable and easy to lose count of time.

I played the game. I tried to like it. Some elements were a lot of fun. Give it a try.

so cool

qka e