I played an hour in the demo. It's... OK? Not too exciting imo. Full game might be better, but demo has failed to impress me.
The ability to fly between planets and land on cities and stations and such is kinda cool, and the flight system is pretty cool. But the actual gameplay seems quite shallow.
Flight is a combination of inertial with the ability to turn a correctional flight computer thing called IDS on and off, which controls thrusters. All thrusters use fuel, even the ones for turning - so try not to goof around too much or it will really cut into your savings at first. Long distance travel is done with jump drive, which seems pretty fuel efficient (my ship burns more from just getting up to speed it seems...). It makes you go fast then suddenly appear where you targeted, within the range of your jump doohickey (I forget what its called, equipment item you can buy and sell). Right clicking to target a station and jumping to it works great and puts you right in line with the docking bay. Doing the same with a planet makes you jump into the planet and go boom. Ouch.
I started as a racer. Picked a mission to race another pilot. Was prepared to use afterburner and fancy flying to win the race... The race didn't start until I flew through the first thingy, and by that time I already had a small lead. The other racer seemed to be casually flying along behind me without any real attempt to win. I even stopped and let him get 5 rings ahead then just flew right on past him. I guess they're in a really slow ship? Basically I spent several minutes casually flying through a bunch of rings for 11k. Not very exciting. Ok, another race mission - this time against a set time. This one I have to afterburn for about 5 seconds in order to make the tighter time limit, but its still just flying through rings. Woo? Just to make sure my opponent wasn't nubified for the first few races I did 3 more against an opponent. Same performance on his part. Same boring casual flying through rings on my part. Next.
So I take a mission to clean a solar array. It makes me use the tractor beam to slowly wipe clean the array. Pay not so good, work about as exciting as washing windows in real life. Ok, lets try a mission to clear asteroids. This one took forever and paid the same as the quick racing one, and shooting asteroids was even more boring than the solar array cleaning. Looking through the list, not too much to choose from each time. I take a retrieve object mission. Fly out, tractor in item, fly back. And another mission to deliver an object. Fly out, eject item. Meh. So far the pay has pretty similar on everything, with all the racing missions paying the same no matter what and all the asteroids the same and etc. I see a crew member wanting to go somewhere for 150k, but I think hes wanting to go to another system so I don't know how to do that. And where are the combat missions? Not a single one offered to me yet. I even upgraded my gun and shield booster and stuff. Me want shoot things!
So I decide to find some combat of my own. I fly back to the station and start gunning down the nearest ship. It's a guild ship, whatever that means. It shoots back a bit, but dies really fast. Nobody seems to care. So I shoot another. And another. The guns are auto targeting, so I just hover over them and hold down the mouse for a few minutes and they go boom. I turned my guns to max power (away from shields) so I can shoot faster. Their AI seems to vary between fly straight at me with guns blazing and fly away doing cork screws trying to avoid me. I try a bit of fancy flying with inertial and junk, but they're dieing quick enough that I don't really need to. They mostly just cork screw away until dead (my guns still hit them OK at close range), so not much challenge there. After killing about 6 ships and starting to fire on a 7th a navy ship finally decides I've been a bad boy and comes to assist. My original target goes down with a few more shots, he goes down just as quick after firing a missile at me which I evaded by cutting engines and firing a counter measure (ok, that was sorta cool...). Other navy ships nearby don't seem to care that I'm slaughtering innocents, they're all still showing as green. Only one that attacked me was showing as yellow. Station still lets me land.
I can scoop up the cargo they drop with my tractor beam. Apparently my single cargo bay can only hold a single type of items at a time, actual number of those items doesn't seem to matter. Huh? Ok, well I do that a bit. Sell each item one at a time while going back and forth to dock and sell it (good thing I did my piracy right by the main station!). Make some more money. Buy some fuel. Load a passenger wanting to go to another system. Time to explore...
I buy the better jump engine thingy and start jumping around. I quickly find out that most of the gate thingies don't work in the tutorial, including the one that leads to where the guy I picked up wants to go - so he ain't going anywhere, and neither am I. I land at a city on a planet. Basically same as station, but more annoying to get to. So I just start jumping and jumping a ways out. Every jump seems to have random ships spawn around me. Where the hell are you guys coming from? Why are random guild, navy, and mining ships following me? I kill a few more of them for good measure. One at a time. They still aren't helping eachother.
At this point I decide to at least try out the custom ship building thing. Apparently my starting engine has me over the cap for the amount of stuff you can have on a ship, so my starter ship is technically impossible to construct normally. Um, yay? Modifications include changing out the engine, shield, wings, and cargo bay for bigger and better and more expensive models. No variety except for the tiered "this one better than that one" approach. You can move the actual part around on the ship model and resize it and stuff to make your ship look different, but that doesn't seem to actually have any effect other than being able to make a ship look slightly different. Theres a bit more variety in the hull list, but only the first few are available in the tutorial - and they're just a tiered approach too. Next one up is slightly less maneuverable, slightly more armored, slightly more room for junk. I redesign my ship and cut the engine down and add some cargo space.
Now I land on the planet, buy some food thinking it will sell for more at the station, fly back up, and sell it for... the same price. I guess maybe trade only works between systems? Difficult, since I seem to be unable to travel to other systems. At this point I'm too bored to try and figure out how the trading system works and I close the game with half an hour remaining on my tutorial time.
Its an OK game, and it might get more exciting once you can actually leave newbie land and take on combat missions, but I don't personally plan to spend $30 on it.
After all this I think I recall seeing a fleeting message when I first started about landing somewhere to start something, so I might have missed out on some kind of plot, but I couldn't figure out how to go back and read the message. In any case, I don't feel like making a new character and trying to do that. The combat was rather bland anyway, imho.
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Topic: Cool Space Sim (Read 4966 times)