O.R.B: Off-World Resource Base

ORB is an ancient game from 2002. It's a whopping 22 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for any modern gaming display resolutions (or widescreen monitors), hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge, or just a cash grab to try profit from abandonware. The game itself had huge potential, being somewhat of a ripoff of Homeworld, but this is a seriously starved gaming genre. This might even be a decent candidate for a remake. But as it is, it's Homeworlds very poor cousin, and nowhere near as good to play. The Homeworld 1+2 remasters would be a better choice for gamers. While you can set the game resolution, it only supports 4:3 aspect ratio, it's not really acceptable in this day and age and playing games pillarboxed is not something I could ever tell gamers they should do. It's enough to fail this for any positive recommendation. Also the UI and game assets are seriously dated. We sometimes take it for granted how nice UIs are on modern games. ORB will certainly act as a reminder. The game never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this game every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just aren't using it. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? ORB is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $4 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again. Even when it was new, this was never a triple-A game. This is the kind of game that went almost directly from the warehouse into the cheap bargain bins at the front of the shop. Now, on Steam, without any modernisation? This is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

Unfortunately it's really not playable anymore as it was never properly designed or updated for higher resolutions. While you can edit the resolution in the ini so it looks great, the problem is the UI acts as if the screen is about 640x480 at that point and fills the screen and flows past it, so it's unplayable. If you use the native resolutions, you're stuck with pixelated distorted graphics. Pity, if it was actually viewable it looks like the game itself held up great otherwise and would still be a good buy and a fun time. If you have an old rig with an old mid res CRT, enjoy. Otherwise, keep looking.

I had this game before steam and all i can say is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ great game.

I may only have spent a couple of hours in this game on steam but I have played many more hours when I got it out of the box when I first got it nearly 9 years ago, I thought it was worth buying again. This game has a bit of a learning curve but it is very intuitive how it lets you take control. Very well done game but highly underrated. Furthermmore this game suffers from few drawbacks other than the ooccassional crash and quirkiness of some maps but beyond that, this game is among my favorite space rts games and totally recommend it.

I played this game years ago and bought it now again. I was concered with technical problems mentionend here in a other comment but on my Win.10, I5 with 1050 I had no performance issues. The game is a little like the old Battle Star Galactica movies and I can only recommed it to everyone who like this kind of real time strategy and is able to ignore the older graphic stile.

A little dated, but solid game. Good concepts and well executed.