AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA IM SKOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMIIIIIIIING

-2020 Update


I take it back. Glaring balance issues. Lack of response from developers. ♥♥♥♥♥♥ features nobody asked for are being prioritized. Fooled me twice, skoom. I'm deeply disappointed.

--OLD REVIEW--


Power 2.0 has been brought together by the new weapons systems. Game is actually running and playing really well. Time will tell if schema follows through and continues the good work, but so far it looks good. I am optimistic.


----OLDER REVIEW----

So I know I have 2000 hours in an early access game with a negative review. The casual shopper may look at that and may wonder why that is. If I've played the game for so long, surely I must enjoy it!

I've been playing this game for about four years now. In that time I've had amazing experiences and made great friends. I've become intimately familiar with the development of the game and interacting with the community. Two years ago I would support buying this game. Maybe even last year. But not now.

The game has been in a state of alpha development for its entire existence. The developers insist that beta is around the corner, but multiple flaws in gameplay persist. Gamebreaking bugs are common place. Improper math leads to broken balancing and combat.

After four years the development team wants to completely revamp how ships are designed. Were this much earlier in development, this wouldn't be a problem. However, the developers now have to update nearly a thousand existing ingame assets in order to make them compatible with the update. Pirate, trader, and derelict stations have yet to be updated to use the current docking system, leaving them with out of date ship systems, although the update dropped over two years ago. Stock pirate vessel assets do not function properly. With the developers teasing and discussing this upcoming update, history would suggest that they will again abandon their existing assets to become utterly useless.

Another major issue comes with the lack of self-awareness that the developers have regarding the marketability of their product. After four years in alpha and three years on steam, Schine has yet to realize that not only is Starmade a niche game, but that gameplay bugs have alienated much of starmade's likely playerbase.

The final issue I'll touch upon (there are others I can discuss) is that starmade cannot handle the scale at which it is marketted. In the trailer on steam, you can see ships zooming past a massive station facility, populated by "players" interacting in a cantina scene. While this is possible, it is hardly feasible. Players desynchronize when switching between entities and at random. Ship positions desynchronize between players, causing much confusion in combat. Multiple station entities are present in a single sector, while in reality this can produce console spam and slow down the sector. Many players build massive ships, dwarfing planets in size. Yet when these ships enter combat, server and client performance comes to a halt. A common performance issue in starmade is having too many turrets on a ship. With the only limiting factor for ship design and production being patience and base storage, this results in multiplayer servers being clogged with ships with hundreds of entities that damn near crash the server every time they enter combat or load into memory.

I have other grievances with this game, but I concede that I got 2000 hours worth of fun out of it. It was a great ride, but I doubt that someone purchasing the game today could get the same enjoyment that someone who purchased the game two years ago would have.