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[Gabeux]

TL;DR:
Janky, early access space game that reeks of potential. Mixes some Freelancer, Elite, Star Citizen and many others into a light, but very fun package.
There are also hints of other games here, like Mount and Blade, but some of those are not developed, fleshed out, or roadmapped clearly yet.
Currently rather buggy and janky but solidly performant, made by mostly by a one-man team as a sequel to his first space game.

Extremely surprising of a mix featuring Space Combat, Ground Combat, Freelancing/Mercenary/Bounty Hunting/Mining/Exploring features and missions, Faction Building and Management (taxing your people and pilots, choosing for more aggressive approach or more peaceful, etc.), Wingman/Squad control, story quests, using Star Gates or warping directly to systems slowly (to avoid the cops and enemies camping gates), using drones to rip people out of Escape Pods and delivering them to justice, silly dialogue, angry aliens, a hoverbike (for some reason) and more.

STEAM LINK
DISCORD LINK
SplatterCatGaming video on it

Full Stupid Intro:
Are you into space games, and ready to try something new?
But the new things are often shallow, not janky enough, and not filled with weird complexity, and they are no longer in Early Access so you can no longer rage at a new bug or laugh at a new completely unbalanced mix of parameters, perks, gear, skills and combos?
Or even worse...are they actual scams, claiming to be single-player games but running on servers with options to trade things for cryptocurrency? And/or the last update was 3 years ago but they keep posting new screenshots of new models and concept art?

Do you want to fly a space ship, jump out from it, and hit someone in the head with an Energy Shotgun?
Is this intro obnoxious enough yet?

Then look no further. Check out Spacebourne 2: the return of Jason Dragonbourne today.


Stupidity aside, I've played the first game from this dev and thought it was a very decent one-man-team space indie game.
I didn't enjoy the storytelling enough to get to the end, but I remember reading the dev saying he wanted to do something more sandboxy, but it was too ambitious for him at the time (or something along those lines). Now, it seems like the time has come for him to develop unhealthy habits and develop his own ambitious indie sandbox space sim!

This game is in the vein of Freelancer, where you fly a ship and do Freelancer (literal name of the guild) and Mercenary missions to your hearts content.
But you can also join the mining guild and mine. Or land on planets and do dungeons. Or harass factions. Hunt a bounty on your way to being an explorer and using probes and to find secret locations. Or play through the story, rebel against alien overlords, protect humanity, build a faction, configure your factions' "constitution", lead pilots in space fights and soldiers in ground fights, research, level up, unlock, get legendary gear that fires so fast it breaks the game's sound system..you get the picture.

Granted, the only thing preventing me from saying this is the "roughest of the rough" is due to the game looking and performing pretty awesomely.
There are plenty of corners to be rough at - the release version (a couple days ago) had as many typos than correct words. Dialogues can be silly and weird and clunky, with AI/synthesized voices until VA become a thing.
But as the Starfarer I am, I have to say I feel the force on this one.

Despite having a bunch of activities to do, like exploration minigames or more involved mining activities, things don't feel like they are there just to check some feature-list boxes.
It feels the game, given time, can become extremely solid and fun, with enough complexity to satisfy more Sandbox Sim players, but not enough to bog down on the dogfighting, space-marine fun.

Some areas feel more well developed than others at the moment, where others feel like Alpha level of development, but in my case..I had a bunch of fun despite all the shortcomings, and I am always looking forward to the next mission, finding and new feature or system unlock. Faction-building, for example, requires some campaign missions to be finished before opening up.

Overall, surprising amount of content for an Early Access release, clearly multiple influences from all favorite Space Sims, and a dev that seems determined on pushing through with it.

For those interested, definitely check it out now if you can deal with potentially bad bugs.
Otherwise, it's worth following and wishlisting it, since this thing mixes some Freelancer with Elite and Star Citizen (and others) in a light, janky package of fun and good times.

Granted, for seasoned veterans, the combat AI is kinda silly. But you can always make up for it by going into harder missions or territories.
The developer is very active on Discord, and suggestions and bug reports get added or fixed rather quickly. My own couple of reports and suggestions got added in a day.

There's some stuff that is still poorly explained or undocumented, so if you don't feel like going over to the games Discord, post here so the hivemind can help.

See you, Space Bournes.

[Dostoevsky]

The Splattercat video did look fairly intriguing, but I'm probably going to hold off for a while until it's further along. Still, good to hear a second (positive) opinion on it.

[Journier]

I want to buy it... almost did yesterday. Just not sure if its gonna hold my interest for long. Impressed with the 1 man team..

[Ygdrad]

I want to buy it... almost did yesterday. Just not sure if its gonna hold my interest for long. Impressed with the 1 man team..

I grabbed it last night, didn't get to play it too long but what I did play was pretty amazing. Well a mix of janky and amazing. You can definitely feel the slightly disjointed nature of all the systems at play but the actual gameplay is pretty fun and smooth. For example, an early mission has you dogfight some fighters in atmosphere and disable a cargo ship trying to leave the planet and you end up with this really cool sequence where you leave your ship, jetpack over to the disabled ship, and get a combat sequence on top of it with third person shooter combat and some jetpack action while a thunderstorm rages around... while cheesy royalty-free epic music plays and comms are voiced by text to speech. It was pretty fun and a relatively unique gameplay experience so far.

[Journier]

I grabbed it last night, didn't get to play it too long but what I did play was pretty amazing. Well a mix of janky and amazing. You can definitely feel the slightly disjointed nature of all the systems at play but the actual gameplay is pretty fun and smooth. For example, an early mission has you dogfight some fighters in atmosphere and disable a cargo ship trying to leave the planet and you end up with this really cool sequence where you leave your ship, jetpack over to the disabled ship, and get a combat sequence on top of it with third person shooter combat and some jetpack action while a thunderstorm rages around... while cheesy royalty-free epic music plays and comms are voiced by text to speech. It was pretty fun and a relatively unique gameplay experience.

Well that last bit of your story sounds pretty damn epic.

[Gabeux]

Well, I'd say I came into this one too hot. I really always wanted to see something like this, where you can quickly go from Space to Ground combat and back. As Ygdrad mentioned, there are some pretty cool scenes to be had due to that.

However, having played most (if not all) features/content that is available right now (that is, unless there's more story missions after a certain part where people get stuck due to a likely bug about conquering Star Systems), I've come to notice that there are a lot of cool things that are just stubs or placeholder. The whole Faction building/conquest thing is ultra janky, and the Factions themselves are all pretty much placeholders that hold territory.
I didn't start playing expecting much, but as I got more and more surprised, my expectations weirdly got higher and higher for the "Empire building" part of it. Although you can fight battles and conquer/plunder/destroy enemy stations, it's all clearly just a early iteration of it.

So I'd say it's still worth trying out, but with very well adjusted expectations about jankyness, bugs and incomplete content.
It seems nowadays people have much more high expectations of Early Access games, and I'm also unsure why the dev didn't take another week to iron out obvious issues and all the typos.

Still, it was totally worth my time checking it out and reporting bugs. Nearly all bugs I know either were worked on or are being worked on atm, so the next few updates should make the game way more playable if the dude delivers.
It's likely this one will take a long time to mature out in terms of jankyness and content completion (unsure if too long), but things going well..it should be a great entry into the space sim genre.
Would really like to see more games doing crazy mix of genres like this.

[Journier]

Bought the game last night for 15 bucks. ended up playing it for 4 hours, its a bit janky guys but its sorta got everything id want in a freelancer openworld game with some empire building stuff thrown in.

Some of the stuff is very unpolished, and god know theres too many menu's in the game, but damn it if it didn't hold me down for those 4 hours while i figured things out.

Worth a buy, especially if the game gets modding or continued support imo. If the guy continues updating it for 4 years like the last spacebourne, id imagine its gonna be a pretty memorable game.

Jumping from your ship, onto another ship you disabled to kill the crew and do a fight its pretty neat.

some of the unpolished parts of the game are as follows imo

• the seeming AI voiceovers, off-putting listening to a worse version of amazon alexa talking in game for all characters
• Performance, the game is maxing out my system and making my cpu/gpu max themselves out for some reason, its not that intense graphically, but it need some performance work on the code side to stop it from just making my fans all run on high to try to keep it under control while i star into the darkness of space. The games getting good fps etc. at all times its just wasting resources imo
• The menu's THE UI is rough, menu after menu to go through in game, but the game has alot of features or expected features, so not sure how the guys gonna make that more user friendly.

TLDR- Id buy it, its 15 bucks, probably by next year more of the jankiness will go away.

[Great Order]

The issue I have with space RPGs is they tend to be either super wide and deep as a puddle (*cough* Elite Dangerous *cough*), or they just don't have much to do in them.

I'll put myself down as "intrigued but waiting" here.

[Journier]

so the gpu maxing out , i have a geforce 3070ti, the game was running the card at 93% power while staring at menu screens etc, all game. I had to go in and manually limit fps to 40 fps to get card to drop down to 50% utilization constantly. Otherwise I had a space heater in my room.

[Journier]

Alright guys I am now 21 Hours into this game, and uhhhh pretty worth it, the faction stuff just adds an entire other level to the game I wasnt expecting, and as it gets fleshed out more i think its gonna be some really interesting stuff, with ship upgrades etc. blowing up the enemy fighting through their defense lines with your faction troops and capturing your first station is sorta a fun little intense thing. Your troops land at the end to capture the point or you can help as well.

Very neat game, I really cant wait to see what its like in 6 months time or so. Dev's kicking out daily patches etc.

It has Points of Interest very much so like Empyrion on planets, and scanning to go explore new POI in space (Half implemented currently),  Really this game is giving me high hopes.

I have had Zero , I repeat Zero crashes in the 21 hours, and only 1 major bug that caused me to revert to a previous save.

Thumbs up.

[Mephansteras]

Always a fan of ambitious 1-man dev games, even if they don't always pan out.

Think I'll hold off on getting this one for a bit, but I'll keep an eye on it.

[vjek]

so the gpu maxing out , i have a geforce 3070ti, the game was running the card at 93% power while staring at menu screens etc, all game. I had to go in and manually limit fps to 40 fps to get card to drop down to 50% utilization constantly. Otherwise I had a space heater in my room.

Tried this out earlier this week, and this is the only reason I'm still not playing it.
Given the simplistic nature of the areas/regions of space and severe limits on everything, there is no good reason for driving 3xxx series cards so hard (I have one too).
It also has a critical memory leak, but it only shows up when you have to do multi-warp jumps, which.. if you're doing missions, is constant.  Uses all available system ram, eventually, but presumably they will fix that bug in short order.
It's a real shame when solved problems like this get in the way of telling a good story. 

[Vivalas]

I saw a new thread here for the first time in a while and was intrigued, and this seems strangely up my alley, almost like a fever dream or something I've had about a game once.

May try it out, I love one man passion projects like these, jank aside, but this comes at the most inconvenient time of me needing a large amount of productivity at the moment, heh


EDIT: Holy hell, I jumped the gun and wrote this before I even looked at anything related to the game (yes that's silly, I know  ) but holy hell I was not expecting what I saw on the steam page based on what I read here. I was expecting like low poly but soulful jank. Like quadrilateral cowboys tier, itch. io stuff. This looks like a full on AAA game, my first impression is Star Citizen / Elite but actually interesting, and the fact you can even leave the cockpit is incredible, especially for this caliber of game.

I have to say that I'll still be managing my expectations but I'm honestly surprised a game like this exists at all, let alone for 20 bucks.

[scriver]

I tried it. I could not handle the combat.

[Journier]

new patch adding more faction stuff!