The mining boom is over, the one percent have profited and have left, and the colony of New Providence is to be shut down by the administrators. But with only one Earth-bound ship about to depart, and everyone is fighting for a ticket to escape the planet – your mission in Ticket to Earth is to fight for justice.
Ticket to Earth, developed by Melbourne-based studio Robot Circus, is a mashup between a sci-fi RPG and strategy games. You play four heroes – Rose, Wolf, Doc and Seven – as they go across New Providence to put a stop to the criminal conspiracy that has engulfed the colony.
When battling, however, it’s all about strategy – with you and the enemy getting two turns to move or attack. But it does come with a twist: in order to move around the board, you must create a path with blocks of the same colour. These will ‘charge’ up any combat powers (such as shields) that you have.
It’s a very interesting mechanism and it does actually work quite well – it doesn’t make the gameplay harder nor easier. I do have one minor gripe – it’s very hard to ‘undo’ once you have started a particular path but then realised you want to go another way. Sometimes it worked, most times it didn’t.
According to Robot Circus, there are other ways to enhance the characters’ combat potential by collecting something called Nitrium – or “the miracle element”. Sadly, I wasn’t able to go into detail due to the limited amount of time to see and play the game at their booth.
I also do like the wide variety of challenges that it has – and not all of them have to do with killing all the enemies on the screen. During the time I had with the demo version presented at PAX Australia, there was a challenge where you had to survive for five turns before being able to leave and progress further into the game.
Ticket to Earth should be coming out sometime this year on mobile, desktop and console.