Recent reviews by NortySpock

Relaxing factory builder with plenty of star systems to explore.

Summary: What Escape Velocity wanted to be when it grew up.


Pros:

Regular weapons + loot-drop weapons + build-your-own weapons + loot-drop ship component upgrades + generic tier upgrades means you can really garden your build towards your fighting style.

Universe feels at least as alive and happening as the original Escape Velocity did, and it does feel like you're in a universe with shipping lanes and traffic and so forth.

There's always another ship to lust after or a gun to upgrade or some tweak or quirk or ship component to swap out.

Power management / weapon space / equipment space balance all feel good (at least on the small ship I have), and even the build-your-own weapon system seems to have reasonable trade-offs (space, heat, rounds-per-minute, build cost) that doesn't just encourage you to build the most tricked-out souped up gun but rather carefully select what you really want for your ship.

It's a game that definitely lets you explore and seach for cool ship upgrades to support your playstyle.

Rock solid stability: I've seen occasional one-second graphics hitches but never a crash or a bug or a glitch or anything weird that wasn't eventually totally explainable.

Mouse-guided ship option is nice and I now prefer it over Escape Velocity's classic rotation mode.

Gorgeous backdrops and space battles once you leave the starter cluster.

Jumpgate + ship warp drive system is a nice combo.



Cons:
No story-driven quests or even mini-quests like Escape Velocity -- but those are just a nice to have. (have not tried the main quest yet.) You're going to have to write your own adventure story.

Tutorial felt excellent -- quick but with a few nice story blurbs, and even had a self-referential joke that I, at least enjoyed -- but I definitely missed that warp drive can use energy cells from the trade store, and so I assumed I needed massive ship upgrades to leave the 6-node cluster of your starting area. (you don't, you just need like 10 energy cells from the trade post and a warp drive.)

There was still plenty to do, but perhaps nudge the pilot once an hour if they have never used their warp drive.

Only 5 factions? Perhaps I haven't explored far enough.

Maybe a game that leans a little bit on glowy graphics and engine trails and bloom-against-a-dark-backround, but that just means the fleet-on-fleet battles are epic to behold. It's definitely a game that sticks to its graphics vision.

Upgrade system is nice but takes a bit of manual sub-component building

Most of the stuff you store in a station can be retrieved at another station -- except for the ones you cannot? I still don't understand which items go in the global station storage and which go in the local station storage...


...Don't let the cons drag you down, if you loved the tachyons-in-your-hyperspace-blown-hair, feel of the open space-lane, that sense of ADVENTURE, that nail-biting weave-and-loop behind an asteroid to turn the tables on the pirate chasing you, that hunger for the next upgrade that you got from Escape Velocity as a kid, this will take you right back.

Lots of fun to play, especially with a buddy.

I admit it, I'm addicted. This game is for the engineer in you, or the space-nerd in you, or the crazy pilot in you. The sandbox aspect leaves it such an open, almost boring game in a "what-can-you-do-anyways" way; yet if you set goals for yourself (land on the moon, go to Mars, come back from the Moon, etc) it can be one of the most rewarding games you can get your hands on.

Don't get me wrong: this game is hard. This is actual-factual rocket science (and sometimes rocket surgery), and as you play this game you will realize how freaking hard it is for NASA to make it look easy, because it's NOT EASY. But the pain of learning how to get into orbit, the dificulty of learning how to intercept another moving target, the stress of trying to land without tipping, without breaking anything and of course without turning into a crater, makes that first successful Moon landing that much sweeter.