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Game
Game2014
O.R.B: Off-World Resource Base
Developer Strategy First
O.R.B: Off-World Resource Base (or simply O·R·B) is a space strategy game developed and published by Strategy First. Much like Homeworld and its sequel Homeworld 2, units can move in all three spatial dimensions. From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
68 reactions from 2 sources (Steam reviews, Bluesky) · newest Sep 23, 2026 · last updated Oct 8, 2026 · How this works
Audience score
72
Fresh
48 positive · 19 negative
95% range 60–81%
| Source | + | − | = |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steam reviews | 48 | 19 | 0 |
| Bluesky * | 0 | 0 | 0 |
* shown, not counted in the score (label accuracy below our 85% bar or not yet audited).
1 newer reactions are still waiting for a label.
Steam's own rating
Very Positive
87 of 108 reviews positive (all languages, per Valve)
What people are saying
Summary pending — the reactions are listed below.
Critics, per Wikipedia
The game received "average" reviews according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. Ron Dulin of GameSpot found the game to be competently executed but generic and lacking imagination.
From the “Reception” section of Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Critic context only — not part of the audience score.
Reactions
60 of 68 · most liked firstThe video isn't a proper trailer for this game! This game was my first space RTS and it's still one of my favorites. For all of you who dug Homeworld and even the combat of the modern SIns of a Solar Empire, this game is a gem. It's the only space RTS I've played that gives you a sense of just how LARGE space can be in maps like this. Because of this you have to commit to strategies, and can't adjust on the fly. This game forces you to develop a near perfect set of tactics for every single map,…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I owned this game on disc before re-purchasing it on Steam. It can be finicky at times, but ORB's take on 3D space combat is still fresh, interesting, and addictive even after more than 10 years. The campaign ramps up fast, so be prepared to spend hours trying to figure out the best strategy to complete a mission. (if you're anything like me, that should entice you!). This is the kind of game you can lose a night in. Let's face it, there have only been a handful of 3D tactical space games…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I am quite shocked that this game actually came to exist on Steam, but I praise valve nontheless. This game is absolutely amazing. It was my FIRST game ever. I remember being about 6 or 7 years old, and my mother giving me this after she saw it offhand at a best buy one day. O.R.B or Off-World Resource Base, is the best spaceflight strategy warfare game that I have EVER played. The story behind this is just as gripping as the gameplay, you play as the Malus, and then after - as the…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Great classic RTS. Yes it seems complicated upon first glance, and yes it is an older game, but once one understands how to play, hours disappear. The sheer vastness of the play area is amazing not to mention the variety and size of units available. The way one moves the camera through the game areas is very similar to Maya or the Sims 3, making rapid and precise movement fairly easy. Lots of fun, great time waster or engaging space RTS depending on the level of attention you want to put in.…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I love strategy games and space games. This game really fills the space where those two desires collide. Yes, this is an older game, but it is so very good. The current price of $5 is an absolute steal when other older re-released games might cost you $10 to $15 to pick up. Be warned though! If this is your first time playing you will really need to play the tutorial and that will take anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour depending on how much you really try to acclimate to the controls.…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I REALLY don't want to write this, but It has to be said. Don't buy it if you have modern hardware. The graphics engine is unfortunatley not compatable and it makes the game nearly unplayable. Even with compatability settings. Google has failed to find any fixes before I refunded it. Which is a shame because this game seemed like homeworld (A game I absolutley adore), with some interesting twists (Like how they handle mining, research, crew management, and espionage). I'm sure the game is…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →It looks like a nice game. It refuses to run on my Windows 7 gaming machine though. So this game is for Windows XP AND BELOW!!! Remember that.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Ah, this game brings some nostalgia. Scanning asteroids, building bases on them, passive+active sensors, beautiful backgrounds, alien speeches - this game DOES have its own 'atmosphere'. Not to mention that it's one of few space real time strategies with full 3D navigating, base building and research. If you're into this kind of game genre don't let it pass by you. And almost forgot - in-game encyclopedia covers almost every aspect of the game including each race pre-history, ships and…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Having owned and played O.R.B's CD version since 2003, I still keep coming back to this game every now and again, briefly stepping into the shoes of my 3nd grade self that summer vacation. The game is entering it's Twenty Third year since it was officially last updated and still has a few nerds like meself still playing it, and not because of the Nostalgia bomb effect it has, but rather it's quirks which always make it a fresh play, such as it's simple acting but surprisingly complex AI which…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I loved Homeworld, I still play it! ORB is Homeworld, just updated graphics.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Wow, Clumsy interface. Plan on reading the manual as there is no tutorial and comands are not intuitive. But it does run on Windows 7, and there may be a good game here.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →If you liked Homeworld, stay clear of ORB. Bad controls, camera, horrible fights (true, enemies fight well, it's more the problem of stupid attack pattern behavior of your and enemy fighters - your fighters engage one group, ignoring the other on their tail, shooting them down with ease). Graphic is not only worse then in Homeworld, you also don't see the ships often - most of the times you see only blue/green/red blibs on radar. There are relatively few units, mostly they are variants on few…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →for the second anniversary of my webcomic i decided to release an album, a game and then yap happy 2 years of O.R.B.! 💛💚 o-r-b.neocities.org/blog/2025-12... tinathecyclops.itch.io/sweet-dreams... caramelcyclops.bandcamp.com/album/the-o-... #webcomic #orbcomic
unlabelledView post →Still a great game after all these years. Sure the graphics are a little dated and 4:3 is stretched to 16:9, but it really doesn't matter. Good game is good. Some may find the pace too slow for them (I would think those that love games like Star Craft would be who I am referring too) but if you ever played EVE Online and loved to mine then this game's pace will be perfect. The focus here is on strategy rather than massive battles and big explosions. This is also still the only game of it's…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A Homeworld-like strategy in 3D space with a strong emphasis on strike craft and formations and different resource gathering mechanic. If you're wandering what that means, play Homeworld first and decide if you like this type of game since it is more polished and less difficult in general. Give it a try if you want something like Homeworld series but played them to death. A comprehensive in-game lore encyclopedy is a nice bonus.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Very well balanced with a good tutorial
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I had a retail copy of this game many years ago. It did a lot of things right that never got adopted by other RTS's unfortunately. If you're looking for this game to be Homeworld, then just play Homeworld. Otherwise, play this and enjoy everything that it is.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Space-based RTS game where you build a base, gather resources, develop technologies, and command a fleet in the fight for control over planets and star systems ✅Blend of strategy and a space theme ✅3D view allowing you to watch battles and ships ✅Ability to customize ship behavior ✅Expansive world with its own history and mythology ✅Good price ❌Despite the good AI, you still need to keep an eye on your ships during combat, especially in more complex engagements ❌Significant disparity in unit…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Bad Game Do Not Buy This game is best described as a worse version of Homeworld 1 (The original not remastered edition). The main failing is the camera controls. Your camera is controled by mouse movement while holding a certian key down, but you can only go in 1 direction at a time. i.e. only up and down OR left and right OR forwards and back. This makes navigating the 3D environment VERY dificult. Throw in a poorly designed techtree, bad unit pathing, bad fighter AI, incrediby slow…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Simple yet slightly interesting story. Meh everything else. Half of the missions bugged, AI is dumb as hell. no diversity in units or tactics - just build biggest units in big numbers etc. If you seek something Homeworld like - this is not it. - mediocore music (often glitch) - mediocore visuals (aside from backgrounds and debries) - mediocore story (logs) - no rock\paper\shotgun system in place - bigger IS better - full of bugs
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Not too horrible for a Homeworld knockoff. Some to the good, some to the bad. Graphics were great for its day (old game, don't expect much by modern standards), ship physics were not very well refined. Asteroid-based play concept was interesting. Too many missions emphasized stealth without making it really possible to sneak. A decent play. Mediocre in its day, not horrible. Better with some user-performed tweaking. Recommended, yes, but not strongly. If you're seriously into sci-fi…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →game does not run my windows 10 amd a4-5000 laptop hd radeon 8330. loaded with many errors about entry point not found in atiumdag.dll. after clickinh passed errors game main screen had maybe 5 fps no changes with compatablity setting or window mode. revirfied game found three bad files but did not fix the problem asking for a refund. give it a try but it's probebly to old to run.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →It does not launch for me. I bought it too long ago for steam to give me a refund, so it is my fault for not testing it when I bought it, but wanted people to have a warning that it may not run on your current systems.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This game is a mixed bag. It's a RTS in space. Two campaigns, two races. It's not a very long game, I finished it in less than 25 hours. Now, I enjoyed the graphics and the music. The 3D map is nice. Story wise... easy to follow, but not very engaging. To be honest, a little boring. The game itself is hard, even at the low levels. Resources are scarce and there's always a big ship that is a very tough match for your little ships. So you need your own big guns, but there's a very expensive…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This game is a guilty pleasure
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Trust me, you want this. Game is AWESOME, but hard. Better than most modern games, actually. Graphics are excellent, plays very good on older hardware. Races are pretty different from each other to require different playstyle. THIS is what needs to have GOTY and awards.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →really great game, only wish I had time to play it more often 10/10
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →its not homeworld but i does have the same qualities as homeworld i like. O.R.B is a good game but not as good as homeworld however its just a shame homeworld not on steam cries for these reansons and other reasons i give O.R.B a personal rating of 8/10 it was good but personally homeworld was better
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →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…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →An inteligent game. a huge UI to remember, in a good way. I like a game to streach my UI skill a bit. The ambiance of the game is spooky and mysterious. GG. have enjoyed.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Navagation points and the Nav map are very confusing. Vectors don't seem to corespond to proper commands. Perhaps it's just me, but it's very difficult to pinpoint a nav point using the xyz axis.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I wanna succ this
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Nostalgia, in a 3D coordinate system.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →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…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A high quality tutorial, well-design 3D tatics mechanism, but graphic is quite old-fashioned, you can hardly buy a game with such completeness in nowadays.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Have played this game since StarDock released years ago, challenging, they were great graphics when first released.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A little dated, but solid game. Good concepts and well executed.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →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.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I had this game before steam and all i can say is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ great game.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A great game with harsh RTS elements. Searching for mineable asteroids, ferrying resources back, and figuring out how to best manage resources across large maps makes for a very, very difficult game. The maps are tiny compared to... well... space, but they give a lot of area to work with. They also have space as 3-dimensional. I know, that sounds like such a little thing, but so many games don't allow you to go up or down, and ORB does. Have an enemy on the other side of the map whose base…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →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…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A not-so-well-made Homeworld knock-off. Buy Homeworld Remastered instead.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Do not buy this game. The controls to selct your ship only make it harder to get to your ship, the game locks at 10 fps, way to low to be playable and very badly made. I would recommend this game if these two things were improved, but until then, do not buy it.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Utterly attrocious on Windows 8. Interface is broken and impossible to complete the tutorial. Do not buy at any price.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I really wish there were more levels to the game in terms of play time. It ends far too early. I would like a sequel. It's not too overly complex so you don't have to learn an entire universe before you can start really playing.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A childhood favourite. Much like Homeworld, Orb has aged quite well given its age. The combat and game play still hold up even to this day and is unique in this regard apart from the aforementioned Homeworld. In short, if you are desperate for a similar game, this is it.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Even after all these years this is still one of my favorite games. This game is a great 3d Space RTS and anyone who is a fan RTS and 3D should check it out!
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Old gamer very good game
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Strong homeworld influence. Interesting and varied fights. Entertaining and captivating story. And a nice study about perspectives. The Graphics are quite outdated, but the gameplay feels fresh and possessive. Definitive recommendation for this gem.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Classic game for a dollar on sale or something, got to love Steam. Still looks good enough too. Runs on my Win 7 machine np.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Fun RTS when it came out and a good story line, I will definitely play this again because I'm a big fan of space RTS games especially the Homeworld series.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I like RTS, Space strategy, and resource gathering games... a lot. This game fails at all of these. The system is very buggy to the point where specific units are not even buildable even after all research is completed. The tech trees are boring, the combat is boring, the slow voice overs are boring... searching 400 asteroids only to find 6 that are gatherable is... ya... boring. After making my own map with 100% asteroid useage, I still was turned off by everything mentioned. Mostly that…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →O.R.B: Off-World Resource Base is a space-based real-time strategy game originally released in the early 2000s and later brought to Steam by Strategy First. Set in a distant solar system rich with valuable resources, the game centers on a conflict between two emerging interstellar civilizations, each vying for survival and dominance. Framed as a large-scale space opera, the narrative follows the militaristic Malus and the more idealistic Alyssians as they expand into contested territory,…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Something like Homeworld. Decent game for its time
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →The first impression that ORB gives is that it's like Homeworld, but a little bit less polished in every way. But after playing for a while, you begin to appreciate just what it was that the developer was going for. The devs have crafted a different take on RTS, and while it's a bit rough around the edges, ORB is worth checking out for fans of sci-fi RTS and for people looking for something fresh in RTS. Rather than just a list of pros and cons, I'll take a little tour through the more…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Like Homeworld, but cheaper. So cheap. Why haven't you spent $0.85 on a game that's just like Homeworld? Buy it already. Let it grow ogrely layers of dust upon ye olde collection of Steam games.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →It's worth whatever Steam is currently charging for it. I love this game.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →nonono... it doesn't even come close to Homeworld at all.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →homeworld but worse
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →An epic struggle for control? No. An epic struggle with the controls. Counter-intuitive. Awkward. Is it worth the effort? If you like space sims or retro games, yes. If you are broke and want a cheap game? Hell yeah. For everyone else? No. I would say save your money but if you can't afford 99c you probably don't have the electricity to run your computer.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →
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