Cubic Odyssey review

The first few hours with an open-world survival game can be euphoric. Undoubtedly, that’s the case with Atypical Games’ Cubic Odyssey, which with its voxel-based engine, resembles Minecraft. Even on a modest Ryzen 5+RTX 2060 combo or a Steam Deck, the title offers fluid framerates, exhilarating draw distances and a gorgeous skybox. And with its galaxy-sized world, where players can travel to hundreds of other planets, the title provides No Man’s Sky scale.

The skeleton storyline details a narrow escape from your home world after a rapidly proliferating plague called the Red Darkness threatens to consume it. Following your getaway, you crash land on a planet, with little more than a hovering companion droid named QB-1. Expectedly, progress is made through an abundance of activities.

I Was a Survival School Dropout

Initially, mining resources and using your Refinery and Crafting Bench is fulfilling as you take raw materials like ore and convert them into parts used for crafting consumables, appliances, drone parts, and tools. While you’ll have to use fuel such as wood or coal in the process, Odyssey’s tutorial does a decent job at explaining some of the essentials.

That said, there was a point where gold ore was needed to push the tutorial along. Since I hadn’t spotted any of the metal, its icon wasn’t showing up in the game’s menu, making it unclear if I could send QB-1 scouting for the material. At present, there’s a multitude of small hiccups like this, goading you into dropping out of survival school and trying to figure it out on your own. If you don’t mind an activity nag on the top of the user interface, Cubic Odyssey lets you do your own thing.

Crafting, for Crafting’s Sake

Either way, you’ll eventually need to craft increasingly complicated items if you hope to get off your initial planet. Sure, that’s a common occurrence in survival games. But having to gather, process, and combine an array of materials gradually becomes a chore. At present, the game’s co-operative component wasn’t functioning. As such, it felt like I was undertaking the exertion of a team as an overextended individual. It feels like Odyssey doesn’t scale things down for soloists.

This becomes mistakenly evident when you face one of the worst aspects of the early game: energy management. Nearly everything in Cubic Odyssey requires electricity, from your flashlight, QB-1, and once you repair your spaceship, even the craft’s weapons. But the Cubic’s powerpacks die quicker than the AA batteries in a SEGA Nomad. Yes, they’re easy to craft, but since the power cells don’t stack up your inventory, a significant number of slots will probably be devoted to them. Inventory management is usually a chore in these kinds of games and Odyssey does little to fix that. Finally, combat feels underwhelming between impractical melee weapons and enemies than either ineptly bounce about or snipe you from far-flung distances.

A Welcome Bit of RPG-Style Growth

But despite the slow pace of early progression, the game does provide a number of useful additions to survival formula. While you are required to build better Refineries and Crafting Benches, skills level up through usage, Skyrim-style. After several hours, my basic mining skills started producing more resources and the excavation process grew quicker. That offered a nice reprieve from the sluggish sequence of tasks when item crafting.

Once you do toil your way through Odyssey’s early hours, things do get better. Repairing a speeder allows you to jet around each planet, saving you from the tediousness of having to jump up every single-block step. Odyssey also gets the ambience right, with planets having their own cinematic-style setlists.

Conclusion

Cubic Odyssey offers an ambitious blend of survival mechanics, expansive exploration, and RPG-style growth that eventually shines. But the early-game grind, clunky inventory management, and solo-player imbalance can make the journey feel more like a test of endurance than a thrilling adventure. With polish and a fix to co-op functionality, Odyssey could evolve into one of the better survival games on Steam. But as it stands, it’s a beautiful and only occasionally engaging experience in its current state.

Cubic Odyssey was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.