When I saw Space Siege at E3, it looked like a nice, light Action-RPG. I had no idea how light the complete version would be.

To even call it an RPG is a bit of a stretch. You do have a character that improves over time, but it’s more of a Progress Quest type thing. Stats improve and there’s little debate over what to improve. Your character will be maxed out by the time he (only a he, by the way) finishes the game.

You can envision Space Siege coming from a small indie publisher. It has no ambition and little color. The skill trees are pointless exercises in who-gives-a-damn. The land mine threat becomes meaningless once you can make grenades by the bucket. And your robot sidekick has infinite lives. When you first find him, your character needs to do minor repairs to make him active; from thereon in he can get blown to bits a hundred times and all you need to do is find a robot vending machine.

But, as the review makes clear, it’s the whole bait and switch about the cybernetics that really gets to me. Half-human, fully-robot, pure human…it isn’t really a moral quandary. You never interact with enough people to see if anybody cares that you change from Steven Seagal to Tin Man over the course of the game. There’s not even a good monologue that pretends that the choices matter. The only real decision comes at the end of the game and boils down to “Join Dark Side? Yes or No?”

None of which would matter if it weren’t for how big this factor was in the preview coverage and throughout the game. There’s a PCGamer cover from September 2007 that has the face of GPG boss Chris Taylor portrayed as half Borg. A more accurate picture would have shown Taylor collecting spare parts from employees he has fragged.

I liked the writing, if not the plot. And some of the art design was good. But Space Siege is a disappointment.

I still have high hopes for Demigod, though.