ΔV: Rings of Saturn

I am very partial to indie games. In particular those who support Linux nativly. If they also belong to the science fiction genre I get really happy. In this case we have a very small but also extremly well focused game title. I have had very little problems with it. It installed well and runs equally good (on Linux in my case). You take on the roll as a "space miner" in the rings of Saturn. This means taking control of your own old spaceship and going out to the rings and finding asteroids worth breaking down for profit. Various raw materials and minerals including water. There are friends and foes in the shape of fellow miners, pirates and much more. There are known and unknown places if interest. Dive deeper to get more profitable rocks. But it costs fuel (reactor mass) and should something happen the way home can be very dangerous, not to mention long. You can upgrade your ship and if the money are plentiful even buy a new one. There are also skilled people to hire. The ship equipment can be tweaked in order to eek out maximum performance from your invested money. On the surface the game loop can be somewhat repetative. But you soon learn new skills and go deeper which will get the blood pumping when you least of all expect it. But in the end the worst enemy is your own greed and inability to do the right thing at the right moment. I like this game alot. It ticks all the boxes: Indie, Linux, GOG, portable, sci-fi and semi-open world with alot of freedom. I find my self coming back to it often. The fact that it is very well presented is an extra plus in my book. I play it with an extra layer of immersion. This comes in the form of an soundscape from background radio chatter noise (I play an MP3 in VLC). If I were to ask for anything it would be a bit more content: more equipment, a bit more to do, alot clearer raw materials market and a bit more depth. Oh, and a better tutorial for sure. Not perfect but close...

If there are other games like this I would like to know, but I don't know if I would play it since Rings of Saturn has set the bar pretty high for me. I bought the game a few months ago and got through the tutorial and went on to play other random GoG purchases. But man now that I'm getting into it and getting through the learning curve (which isn't vast or difficult) it's going to have to be on my list of main games played. In the game files there are details related to the develpment of the game and the plans for upcoming content and fixes which is updated through the link which I find helpful and different. Make sure to use your console sytem maintenance menu. Important tabs are there for navigation, ship module power re-routing and managment. Also it's where you can get hailed down and vice versa with other ships, you can get things like racing and contractor missions to name the few that I have come across. And most importantly to set up an auto pilot route back to Enceladus Prime Station. There are lots of tools at your disposal that will help you gain a better understanding and control of your environments. It's just so cool if being a "Space Commander" is your thing. Make sure to use the ship controls that keep you in auto pilot as it's more efficient and keeps things easy until you decide to use manual controls, (your trajectory and heading info stays green where manual shows nothing around your ship.) I can keep going but yeah, I hope this helps you in deciding to try the game and keep playing it.

It's a nice mining simulator when it works. If another ship spawns in, FPS tanks. No GPU or CPU reason for it. Better hope TWO ships don't turn up. Google turns up many reports of similar problems, many attempts to fix it, but no real solutions. Nice game though. Lots of different ways to mine asteroids, from using the ship to grab ore chunks to using nanobots to bring the ore to you, to... using two mechanical arms to bash the asteroids against an anvil inside your hull? Oh well, it works to get the ore out. EDIT: Found a workaround! --no-vsync --set-fps 60 Game still slows down like it's going up a big hill every time any other ship spawns in. You can almost hear the game engine muttering "I think I can, I think I can, I think..." But at least the player ship is still controllable now.

Inertia is caricatural, I'd sooner call it ragdoll physics - writing it after hundreds hours in Kerbals including hours spent on docking in space. Sometimes engines insist on firing at full power in randomly choosen direction (and no, no target object has been choosen), same for ship's rotation - I completely stop and ship starts to franticly rotate around own axis. Barely any tutorial and no mechanics explanation at all. Generally a lot of (rather plesant) grind, but what gets on your nerves is having no idea how can you progress & random irrational ship behaviors that are wasting last hour or two of progress.

Good game to kill an hour or two.