One thing’s for sure: Consortium isn’t afraid to hide one of its chief influences. Mere minutes in, responding to a quip from the pilot of a futuristic craft crammed with quasi-military types, I jumped on the best of three possible responses: “So you’re the ship’s joker, right?” Had it used a capital “J,” developer Interdimensional Games might as well have shouted out its inspiration. Indeed, Consortium is partly Mass Effect stripped of all that business of exploring worlds and drilling planets, opting instead to unfold events in an aircraft from 2042 that feels like the Normandy and looks strikingly similar to a Boeing 747. L. Ron Hubbard would be proud. But this isn’t some soulless rip-off; look past crippling bugs and visual oddities, such as water faucets that seem to spit mercury and the Tomb Raider-circa-2003 faces, and you’ll find a role-playing game experience that’s at least worthy of breathing the same air as BioWare’s space saga.

Consortium presents us with a distin…