Recent reviews by natswright

I played this for about an hour and a half before refunding it. Thasts not to say it's a bad game, it really has potentiasl, but in its current early access state it suffers from poor AI and rather unbalanced units. Its a little confusing as to what some of the deployable units do too, and where and how to deploy them. The FPS mode is a noval idea, but again, its difficult to understand what to interact with in that mode. Even getting marines to board an enemy station was difficult. There is a huge behemoth unit that looks cool, but has a reletivly limited damage output.

I really liked the idea of customising the product your company sells, its a neat idea. The soundtrack is absolutely fabulous too.

Lastly i'd like to see full 3d movement of units. I think the developer could learn a lot by looking at the Homeworld series of games too, especially around the interface design, which is terrible at present. The UI is probably the biggest thing holding the game back.

If you want to support the developer, grab the game now, although £20 is rathe a lot for a game that you'll be helping to play test!

For me, i'll keep an eye on this to see how it develops. For now it's a thumbs down.

I'd been waiting an age for this game to come out, getting more excited the closer release got. If I'm honest, it's not quite what I expected. This is a survival game, collect resources, upgrade things, like your ship or multi tool and move on.

Discovering new species is fun to start with, but after only 20 hours game play, i'm bored with the game and feel as though i've paid too much for it.

Yes, its fun for a while, but it gets repetitive very quickly.

There were bugs on launch, with performance and with the pre-order starter ship, however these were fixed for the most part. Quite how a graphically simple game like this is so taxing on my computer is a surprise, but it is.

At is current price, I can't really recommend you buy it, at £40 it's not worth it, there is little to do and the different planets are much the same. Grinding resources out to make hyperspace jumps and so on is a pain too. The stations are basic, there is hardly anything to do.

The flight model pretty much controls your ship in the atmosphere, and low level flying is very tricky, especially when landing.

I like the game, but am simply bored with it.... why, well, its the missing content we were promised.

planetary physics
ship classes with meaningful differentiation
faction reputation with meaningful gameplay impact
homogenous resource availability
asteroid landings
space station and fleet destruction
large fleets
traveling freighters
large scale battles the player can join
in-atmosphere battles
NPCs outside trading posts and other docks
ringed planets
sand planets
flying between stars (as opposed to warping via the Galactic interface)
complex creature behaviour including environmental interaction
rivers
points of interest such as large structures and crashed freighters
hacking locked doors
radio chatter
interaction with other players

All the above were missing, and check out the review here to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTTPlqK8AnY

Contrast that to Elite Dangerous, I've spent 600 hours plus in the game, and have played it al least once a week since it was released on Beta almost 2 years ago.

My thumbs down review will change to thumbs up when the price drops to £15 for the game.

I've not yet played all the way through the game, but have completed a little of the single player campaign. I'll write my thoughts now and update the review as I go through the game. This is my initial impressions.

Graphics, gameplay and performance

Again, graphically, the textures are of high detail for a RTS game and its a joy to zoom in and see the detail. Talking about the zoom, I like the tactical view, but, would love the ability to zoom out a little further, this game needs a supreme commander like tactical zoom. It can be tricky to navigate the battlefield when there is a lot going on.

You can customise the look of you fleet, for each battle, away from the default JCB yellow and in skirmish/multiplayer, play as either of the two factions, the Coalition or the Gaalsien. The Gaalsien have production carriers, allowing them to create units anywhere on the map, where as the carrier does this job for the Coalition, so they have managed ti create two gameplay styles here.

I played this on my Core i5 4670 with GTX 970 and it looked amazing, frame rate a costant 60fps, lovely to look and and play with such a smooth frame rate. All settings were set to maximum. The minimum requirments suggest a GT 440, which is less than half the power of the GTX 860m in my 3ghz core i5 4210h laptop. Initially I got an appauling framerate in 1080p, and wondered what it would be like on one of the older cards! Dropping to 1600x900 or 1280x720 resolution, settings can be upped to medium and a respectable 20 - 25 fps can be acheived.

**Update** I investigated further to see the cause of the low framerate and it was a combination of things.Firstly a recent Windows 10 "upgrade" had reset many of my settings to default, so the nvidia GPU was on auto select and the game had chosen the onboard intel gpu to run it! Forcing the 860m to again be default gave me 60fps at ultra. :)

The game seems stable and i've not experiences any crashing.

Single Player

Lovely cut scenes and graphices, love the audio and it really adds to the atmosphere of the game. I played on normal and found the game very balanced and fun to play. The AI didnt overwhelm you, but put up a good fight. Early on you are led through the first misson propper, after the initial training mission.

Skirmish mode.

Oh dear, what happened here. I played this against and easy AI and it was impossible to get production off the ground, the AI relentlessly attacks from the off and you end up running out of resource collectoes before you have time to build any offensive units. Even when I did get some units, the AI player seemed to have overwhelming numbers very early on. The developers really need to fix this as the AI is stupidly hard to play against and skirmish mode is where the replay value is, co-op multiplayer vs the AI and so on.

Multiplayer

The multiplayer is really good fun and when you introduce another player into the mix the AI responds diferently, is more cautious and doesnt bombard you with so many attacking units. Seems there are a fair number of people playing the game, so finding a multiplayer mach was relatively easy.

Game modes are limited to Annialate everything, or just kill the carrier to win. You can turn artifacts on and off, these are kind of like capture the flag missions, get five to your extraction point and win the game.

I'm not the best games player, so was easily beaten, but as i'm relatively new to this game I'm sure i'll get better.

Overall, I'm enjoying the single player. Its just a shame about the low end perfomance at 1080p espically, and the insanly hard AI in skirmish mode on 1v1. I hope in the future there will be more in the way of units added, whether through dlc or free updates, as what you have on offer is limited.

I paid 23.99 for the game and think it was money well spent. I'll do a final update when i've completed the campaign, so far I've found it very absorbing. The game reminds me very much of the origional homeworld games, and has a great look and feel to it

I'll give the game a thumbs up for now, but will update the review as I go through the campeign :)

Great buy at a fiver!