It would be wrong of me to describe Julai as bare bones. It would need a fair bit more content before it could justify such a lofty title. There’s very little going on within any aspect of this game; it’s built on the Unity free engine and is heavily comprised of modified assets. There’s no plot, only one stage and no controller support. There’s no tutorial, no game modes, no explanation on what you’re supposed to be doing. No achievements, no card drops, no kind of progression. Julai asks you to fly through a singular unchanging, unending environment, randomly spawning one of the two enemy types the game boasts with no ultimate objective in sight. At time of writing, it asks you to pay £15 for this.
That’s the same price range as Strike Suit Zero, a tenuously similar game in only the broadest genre terms possible. Both are 3D space shooters, but Strike Suit Zero drowns you in options and beautiful deep-space environments. In turn, Julai’s only slightly cheaper than Elite Dangerous which boasts 400 billion star systems. Which is a little bigger than Julai’s one cityscape from the awfully-named Technogenic Planet. Strike Suit Zero and Elite are not flawless games, but they’re polished and professional efforts, each promising hours of evolving gameplay. Why is this relevant? Because that’s the direct competition that Julai has chosen for itself by indulging in such a ridiculously inflated price bracket. It openly invites this comparison through its own choices and gets stomped flat by it. It’s silly to pretend otherwise.
But let’s do a spot of pretending, anyway. Let’s pretend that Julai sported a sensible price that people would pay without being infuriated by the threadbare content and borrowed graphical stock assists. It would certainly be easier to be sympathetic to the game’s one man development team, because the entire thing reeks of inexperience. There’s ideas included that don’t lack in ambition, but are inelegant in execution. For example, you have the option to rebuild and remodel your craft as you play, which is a good idea. As you eat damage, parts of your ship explode or fall off, so being able to graft new parts on the fly is an interesting angle. Even more so when it doesn’t just pertain to repairs; you can constantly tinker and improve your craft. Eventually, anyway. I did mention that lack of tutorial, remember? Julai just drops you into its world and stuff starts shooting at you, and you’re left to figure it all out for yourself. Sometimes this is an excellent approach and it has a strong narrative worth, making you feel like a small part of a bigger world around you that isn’t interested in holding your hand. It’s hard to feel like a small part of an already tiny world, though. Coupled with the lack of care running roughshod throughout the game, Julai’s reluctance to teach you anything about itself just comes across as lazy.
You’ll eventually figure out that your scrapyard ship might control like a 3D space fighter, but attacks like an on rail shooter. You don’t need to aim your nose at anything to blow them up and instead have a reticule you can freely control with your mouse. It’s an interesting kind of freedom that lets you act like a gunner as well as a pilot, especially when coupled with the ability to swap cameras to blast away at targets on your rear. You’ll use this to attack the same targets over and over and over again that listlessly explode in begrudging indifference to a tepid weapon onslaught that lacks any real feel of force. That’s if you can even get to them; for the most part your Julai ship controls competently, but any contact at all with the scenery will bring it to a direct halt. I’ve quit games after colliding a few times now because the craft stubbornly refuses to leave a bit of building or girder it has lightly nudged. Sometimes, you just have to accelerate out of these situations, and you do that using the default keyset that are uncomfortably cramped together. Because you can’t remap them. And there’s still no controller support.
It’s befuddling. The craft builder isn’t that complex once you spend a fair bit of time figuring out how it bloody works, but other things seem to exist for no other reason than to confuse you. There’s an option to turn on auto pilot right there on the bottom of the screen, but it doesn’t work. And it won’t work unless you pick up a specific power up somewhere out there in the randomly generating, never-ending world of the same building recycled endlessly. Even so, maddening little bubbles of promise crop up. The game world has different weather cycles and you can hunt down vertical shafts that delve into the planet’s core for a momentary and slight change of environment.
It reminds me of how I first found out about Julai. I found its launch trailer almost by accident and while there was nothing it could do to hide the stock graphics that looked a decade behind and the music that mumbled inaudibly in the background, it showed the craft drifting through a cloudbank almost leisurely before descending and picking away at the planetside defences. It didn’t show much else, because that’s what teasers do; they only show you a little bit of the game. Or so I thought. Turns out that’s pretty much it. And that’s not nearly enough.
