(really minor spoiler)

I really enjoy what I call 'straightshot' game (short playthrough, losing a lot is core to the gameplay and such) like 'realm of the mad god', 'hack slash and loot' .... ok.
But this one .... I really loved the first hours, I got totally sucked in ... I liked the crappiness of some ships (mainly the first one), loved to discover new ships and try them out many times with different strategies .... and then I unlocked the Zoltan ship.

I was really psyched to try it because the ship/race visual design is really fun ..... and then (spoilers ahead !) the horror : worst designed ship interior, zoltan are in fact horrible to play when you have more than one, all the weirdness of the interface just turn to pure shit when you have to move your zoltans through your ship, their low hp make them really bad in most cases (they are the fastest to go from 'starwars mode' to 'deadspace mode'), they are not worth their price to buy, making them start with a beam makes the beginning reeeeally long/boring-as-hell and their achievements are really bad chosen.

I really loved that game, played it a lot and all, I was ready to put it in my top 10 games of all times .... and now I just won't play that game anymore due to some design choices that are repulsive when combined.

I rarely create topics, I made this one to give this advice : great game, but don't try it if you can't stand repetitive frustrations. It's the only game I got angry with in * at least * the last 30 I tried (the last one in my angry list was Chaos League and it was soon after release ... in 2005 I think).

So just to be clear, you hate the game due to a single unlockable ship. Despite all the stuff you enjoyed about the game, the fact that one unlockable ship didn't measure up to your standards, the entire game is now rubbish. It's your opinion, and I'm not going to try to take that away from you, but I honestly don't understand the rationale behind it.

I knew reading my post again would sound a little harsh, but the feeling remains. To put it differently, I really really enjoyed the game, each discovery felt rewarding, then I reached a point where I was expected something great ...and it wasn't at all. Just this sentiment of 'cover up', 'unfinished features' or 'poor design'. I wasn't meaning it's a bad game at all, I just felt a huge disappointment I didn't feel in a game for a long time.

I didn't want to make a review because I think reviews are pointless due to the lack of filtering options, but I wanted to warn- people : I am someone who hardly never get angry with videogames (and I'm used to play with angry people), but in spite of being great, this one really pushed my buttons.


Edit : I have to admit my topic title is poorly chosen. It should be something like : "I really like this game, it doesn't"

You were probabily under the assumpion that every ship unlocked had to be good/better than the previous ones... it is not the case here; there are races and ships that are harder to use effectively, tricky to gain achievements in, starts with clearly worse weapons and have unconfortable room layout or are very power-hungry and so on
(Me, i'm not really a fan of the Slug ships, while i think the Zoltan ones are funny)

However, it is kinda the point of the game; to try (and die trying) new ships and see if/how you can still get a victory...

Hehe, good thing you didnt find Stealth Ship B, you would have probably quit computer games altogether.

Btw...crappiness of the first ship? It is one of the best ships so that newbies have a good chance of winning. I win 9/10 games with that ship now, the one time I don't, it is my mistake. Game is actually pretty boring if you know you will nearly always win.

My impression is that many ressource (time, reflexion, design ...) have been misused (or wasted) in that game. At the end, what could have been one of my greatest gaming experience, just turned to be one of my most frustrating one I want to forget.

I didn't give any frustration material so far, so here I go (spoilers ahead) :

Zoltans ...
When I first met those guys, I really loved the clasic/cheesy scifi vibe about them. Then I saw their advantage : 1 extra power, which is invaluable in the late game. I was really psyched. I checked the drawbacks, they're tinfoil made and expensive to hire. Ok then, I'll just lock them in their romm with escort, keep them oxygenated and as far as possible from fire/agressors. I had many marvellous space adventures with some of those guys ...
Then I got a zoltan ship. Yes. A shipful of zoltans. It was disco night all the way through the end of the galaxy ... or so I thought.
Basically the problem is that : You have a zoltan ship, full of zoltans. You want someone to man your guns ... that's great, you can do better than that, you can have your guns zoltan'd !!! Remember ? The free energy and all ! That should be great , huh ? In fact no it isn't, due to the interface.

Zoltan's are weak and can't fight on par with most other race, so if your gunner is agressed you want to have him leave the room. But many times, that would mean your gun will go out of power. Pausing won't help you. you often can't. Sometimes you can spend half an hour swapping guns positions to keep them powered ...but when you can't you just can hit 'restart' because it's faster.

Zoltan's are weak and burn like a charm (and have the weakest respiratory capabilities in the universe), so if you flee fire (or asphyxation) ... you have to constantly check if your zoltan didn't deactivate the oxygen when he fled accross the room, or the shields. If you wanted to hide your zoltans in the Oxygen room BUT cut the oxygen to extinguish fire faster .... you can't (this part I haven't had to check but I think it's impossible).

Zoltan's have only ray guns, the loooongest guns to powerup (and those which use most 'windowing' which make them even loooooonger to use) .... but as I said they often get out of power ..... so when thing go a little hectic ...just hit 'restart'. And to use ray guns the most efficiently, you have to spend three hours and a half fighting pixels, because of the interface (after having waited 5 hours for your window of opportunity). And the two zoltan ships use ray guns, why ? I can understand the only zoltans in zoltan ships... but the ray guns ...?

Bottom line (I will repeat myself a little with the first post) : I was really psyched to play the zoltans, but in the end I went through a world of pain because of interface design and gameplay issues : fight with your zoltan and die or flee, lose your guns then your ship ? I'll just hit 'restart'.
Zoltans are just the slowest to progress because they use the slowest guns, and they're the one who can get wipe the fastest on the whim of randomness... It feels like I'm hitting 'restart' all the time (not that much in fact because of their slowness :p) .

I like this game enough to make a long post with my issues. Just don't get the wrong idea : I don't think I'm blindly bashing, just giving my (frustrated) input, but please, by all means, correct any of my wrongful statements. For now I'll just stop my 'ranting'.

As a big Escape Velocity player, I'm really sad this game (despite being great) isn't for me after all.

Last note : the topic tile was poorly chosen, sorry again for that.

Edit : And I just realized I didn't answer to you, 'lost in frustration' you could say. Let's fix this shall we => I totally grasped the 'die trying thing', and that's one of the two reason I bought it in the first place ('spaceships' is the second). I'm pretty familiar with the concept as I said earlier.
But in the end, having an unforgiving game punishing you with an 'unfriendly' interface (in the sense there are things you should be able to do but can't), when on the other hand a great deal of care is given to a ranking system which is pointless in my opinion for a game that rely so much on randomness, this is adding insult to injury (because I have no better expression to pinpoint my feelings). I agree with the 'calculated risks' things, but so much random events invalidates the rankings. Personnal opinion as usual. In fact, I don't care for the rankings whatsoever, but I find the design priorities not rightly set.

Weird that you have such strong feelings because of one layout. I only played through the game once with Zoltan A,unlocking layout B, which I thought was more interesting, because it starts without normal shields and has more interesting weapons. So I just kept playing with that when I wanted Zoltans.
Not sure what you mean by bad interface and the randomness is no problem if you play the game well, but that has been discussed here thoroughly before. Summary: Randomness can ruin the best,BUT only in Sector 1, after that its just an excuse for people who cant realise their own mistakes,and thus wont ever learn from them.

For example being boarded at a sun. A experienced player will use airlocks and the medbay to handle the intruders and the fires. A bad player will lose the game and blame the mere fact that he even had that encounter on randomness, not on his own ineptitude to handle it. He will not learn from this failure, he will just give up the next time it happens and possibly make a "game is pure luck" thread (not talking about you here, some guy with a big Z).

There is nothing in the interface that makes Zoltans harder to play, honestly...you need the same level of micromanagment, and you can do the same things you do with other races because, even if you feel the pace is quicker, you can always pause the game, so don't say "you often can't"

Yes, they have lower health, you just need to be a little more proactive, and no, you don't really have to do a full Zoltan crew run; if you feel they are weak, hire some "bodyguard" of a different race (pilot station, for example, should be switched when possible, since a Zoltan there is a waste of power)

Also, the starting layout (A layout) is far from horrible, you got:
- improved blast doors, that help right there with boarding (and the last upgrade is cheap)
- a 1 shield piercing beam, and a cheap missile lancher, which works good in tandem... the launcher isn't even needed for the first sector or two.

Last but not least: The Zoltan Shield
This augment right there is able to overcome most of the initial shortcomings; as long as it holds, you are invulnerable to both direct damage AND boarding, and so you have plenty of time for you beam to charge and have the first shot... not to mention that the halberd can easily hit 3 rooms at once and often 4 in a single shot.

Tons of clicks for accomplishing not much some time. I don't think I said it was bad. I like the simplistic way things are done, but when zoltan begin to mess with your energy management, you'd wish the interface had some more features for example. Or, in a game where all is square based, when you use ray guns you have to play with pixels, which is tedious. Seriously, why not use a system where you select an area of X contiguous squares ???? Something neat and clean ...
This is what it's all about really : in my experience, all the little details became really bothersome once I began playing the zoltan, because it all added up. .... so that's a good thing I didn't came to make a rant about randomness :)
However, on this particular point I have to disagree with you. In my experience, it's not sector 1 where I pray to not meet an unfortunate demise, it's more in sector 3 with the killer-bots. But I don't complain about that. I was wondering which part of my post you were referring to ....but it seems one of my sentences is incomplete (words are mising). I will clarify what I meant.

{edit} I already deleted my original notepad, but I think I mis-pasted something, the lack of capital letter and sense are highly suspicious. Thanks for poiniting that out.
Consider the "you often can't" as something that should be erased. I won't reedit for now.

So my point was, if you have 1 zoltan allocated to power 1 gun and you are at max capacity ... nothing with the will guarantee you the gun will remain powered as soon as the zoltan moves out of the room. You had to have micromanaged that before your zoltan entered the room. This is one zoltan specific management issue. You can't be sure if you didn't check.
But I agree with the game 'learning from failures' philosophy : the zoltan manning guns are a bother ? Ok, from now on I'll pack them all in the reactor room then, don't move them separately, and don't let them man the guns for zork's sake ! I won't use gunners if that's what it takes, ray guns doesn't need it at least ...
{/edit}

You could just invest in one more energy to have a buffer. Or before moving them out create a buffer by taking energy from oxygen or so. Then things won't depower.


Edit: Sorry, its buffer in english, not puffer. :D

Since you don't usually have to move around your crew all the time, and they don't move on their own, this is not much different from having your weapon room damaged... you'll know when you'll need to intentionally move them, and take action

Also, just have some spare power ready... medbay can be always off, since zoltan self-power that when in need of healing, and you can juggle a bit with oxygen; unless you are running for the "Manpower" achievent, after a couple of battles in the first sector you should have enough scrap to buy some more energy banks

By the way, do you know that you can switch weapon order while in combat?
since the Zoltan always power the bottom, leftmost energy slot, you can drag&drop a cheaper weapon in the first slot, at any moment, and gain some energy back...

Five.

You can actually hit five rooms with a single shot.

It's a bit tricky to aim, and not always possible, but some ships are really sitting ducks to a Zoltan beam as long as you can pierce their shields.