Orbitals Game Review: A Look at the Indie Space Experience

Orbitals, the two-player co-op adventure from publisher Kepler Interactive, opens with its twin protagonists saying "sayonara" to every gadget they leave behind. It's a tiny detail, but it captures everything likeable — and ultimately everything underwhelming — about this anime-flavored take on the co-op formula popularized by It Takes Two and Split Fiction.

Meet Maki and Omu

The game introduces Maki and Omura as toddlers in a gorgeous hand-animated cutscene, set aboard a space station moments from destruction. The pair are placed into a machine that apparently digitizes their minds and loads them into freshly grown clone bodies — a dark setup the two seem entirely unbothered by. Fifteen years later, they're still racing around their starship home, trading taunts like "You're the slowest slowpoke ever!"

My co-op partner and I spent our first minutes simply admiring the run animations: Maki's light-footed steps down staircases, or Omu's transition from a hand-in-pocket slouch into a full-on Naruto run. Voice actors Rebecca Wang and Stephen Fu handle the English dub capably, but I switched to Japanese audio early on — the kids' constant chattering lands far better in a language you don't fully parse.

Know-How on Display, With Caveats

Director Jakob Lundgren previously designed It Takes Two and Split Fiction, and it shows. Orbitals understands the genre's rhythm: introduce an idea with a snappy close-up — the kind you'd see in an infomercial — then move on before it stales. That pace matters, because long cutscenes in a game where your partner sits on voice chat are risky business.

The story rambles without making much sense, though the cutscenes, produced by Japanese animation studio Studio Massket, are genuinely lovely to watch. Maki and Omu are also far less grating than most of director Josef Fares' recent creations. Where Orbitals stumbles is its toybox. The three core gadgets — the Liquid Launcher, Beam Cannon, and Scrap Hook — are all variations on aim-and-shoot, and they stick around for the whole game rather than being waved goodbye. Puzzles recombine them in ways that feel familiar: one seed-planting, water-sprouting sequence is essentially It Takes Two's nailgun section redux.

A hacked microwave oven is the standout, blending Metal Gear Solid's steerable Nikita missile with shaky-cam chaos and light-revealed platforms — but even that is underused. Nothing here hits the memorable highs of Split Fiction's hoverbike captcha or its finale. Days after finishing, I needed screenshots to recall specific moments.

Spaceship Sections Never Reach Orbit

Orbitals' big differentiator is ship flight: one player pilots while the other handles turrets. Yet the ship follows an invisible rail, so both halves of the split screen usually show near-identical views. A mid-flight weapons room hinted at something like a 3D Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, but the game never exploits that asymmetry. The top-down shmup segments, where each player controls one stick, work far better.

Verdict

Frustrating puzzle executions aside, I never had a bad time in Orbitals — the constant presence of a friend carries a lot. If you treat it as a shiny pub table with a middling anime on in the background, there's plenty to enjoy. Just don't expect much to stick after you've said goodbye.

A copy of Orbitals was provided for this review by Kepler Interactive.

Source: Eurogamer