I was only interested in playing with a joystick, but the game only has support for yaw, pitch, and throttle on a single joystick. Not even roll. This means that you will have to use the keyboard for roll, strafe, altitude, and throttle, since no one's actually going to use that on the joystick. This is pretty poor considering it's 2 years after Freespace 2, which at minimum has the 4 primary axis and multi-controller support. A lot of the other complaints on here seem incorrect, the menu navigation is done with mouse or arrow keys, and there is an options menu to rebind things.
If this game wasn't literally the only 6DOF shooter besides Overload and it's parents, the Descent franchise, I would've stopped stopped playing pretty quickly. This game is waiting and tedium personified, based on the in game stat trackers, I'm guessing about 1/6th of my playtime is actually having fun with the combat, and that's not exaggeration. It's a looter-shooter in space, so half my playtime is in menus looking at weapon stats and selling garbage. There's item sets with bonuses, except drops are random and as typical, when you level up things quickly get outdated, so you can't ever synergize and get weapon sets you like until end-game when you don't need it anymore anyways. 2/3rds of my time not in menus was spent randomly flying around in 3d space looking for stupid loot boxes, batteries, battery ports, and button sequences. None of it was fun nor interesting, but hidden in that garbage is stat boosts. So with the 1/6th of the time that I had fun with, it's really fun with dual sticks. There's just so much time spent doing nothing or purely unfun things, they really needed to balance that out so you spend more time doing the fun, and preferably being able to actually have builds you can stick with instead of constantly shuffling items.
Back in the good ol' days when even kind of crappy games were still fun. For $2, this game offers plenty, though the second mission basically just straight sucks. It's pretty short, can be beaten in a night or two but I think it's good for a couple replays of favorite levels.
I spent 30 hours in this game, and I'd say the first 10 were alright. After that it turned into a slog of trying to figure out what to do, and very slowly travelling from point A to B after consulting a guide. I was essentially forced to just sit around and wait for things to happen for minutes on end. I'm a patient man, but this was too much. It also heavily distracted from the story for me since it took so long to get through it I forgot certain things. I ended up dropping off a lot of spirits at the Everdoor at the end, and it sprang a new one on me or gave me the option to end the game. I chose to end the game because I couldn't deal with spending another 10 hours slowly acquiring things to send off the final spirit. I can't honestly recommend this over an edited playthrough on YT, though I don't inherently regret my purchase. I just wanted to spend less time sitting around doing literally nothing just waiting for things to happen.
It's actually a pretty good concept, but the isometric camera destroys any sense of your location in the world and it breaks the primary gameplay mechanic of stealth. The world is very complex with a lot of elevation changes. The parkour mechanics usually work pretty well, but it's impossible to know where you're going or how to get there when there's constant obstructions in the way you can't see in game due to the camera angle, or on the map due to it being way too low res and missing any detail. There's a constant feeling of being lost even in familiar areas. The game also doesn't show custom map markers on the minimap in game... so it has literally no purpose. It breaks stealth gameplay since you can't see ahead of you and enemies can see you from off screen. The only counter for this is to constantly use scan mode which is a really bad solution to a problem they could fix by reducing vision cones. There's also a slew of other janky minor annoyances that ultimately culminated in me just quitting the game.
Steam reviews are inundated with people complaining about how this isn't a space sim. It's not, it was never marketed as such and was intentionally designed not to be. Where Elite Dangerous spends more time sitting in sub space focusing more on shooting rocks at a sluggish pace and checking menus, this is more DOOM meets Burnout or Twisted Metal. Even the starting garbage ship in RGO is twice as nimble as the top end fighters in ED, and along the yaw axis it's literally 100x more nimble. This game was designed for dog fights in space, using ludicrous speed, high power weapons, and obscene amounts of enemies. I haven't played Privateer or Freelancer, but it has more in common with Freespace than ED or SC. I think the only reason it has mining/trading is because they already had a system set up from the first game. It's far more focused on getting jobs, leave station, jump straight to fight, move on. This game doesn't waste your time. It does have issues though. Primarily, it desperately needs more keybinds. You can only target the nearest enemy, or cycle through everything within range. You can pick up cargo, but you don't have any way to lock on to it. There's starting missions where you have to clear out minefields, but you can't lock on to them. In larger battles, good luck trying to lock on to something shooting you. There's a targeting mode pulled from the first game, but it's very clunky to constantly have to use it, and I'm using a joystick. It doesn't work well. There's only 4 stages of forward thrust in 25% increments. This sucks. This leads to an over reliance for me on using auto-tracking simply because it matches the targets speed. Throttle up is also assigned to warp jumping and tractor beam, which means mid combat you can pick up illegal cargo the cops will immediately scan for after battle and open fire.
I got the game for free in a GOG giveaway, so price has no relevance on my opinion. I'd say good for people who like LOL style gameplay. I actually rather enjoy the mostly simplistic story, so far it's been done pretty well. The level design is pretty decent and they look pretty good. The voice over for the cutscene narrator is way louder than anything else in game. Basically, I just didn't really enjoy the combat. Kind of feels like LOL or something to me, which has never enraptured me. Always just feels like you click on things and spam spells/abilities as much as possible. The story seemed pretty decent and I'd like to see it through, but really the combat is such a bore and a chore to me that I doubt I ever will. The characters are also pretty decent and will have an amount of party banter that isn't repetitive or annoying. The only thing I didn't like was the combat.
I played this blind for the first time, and I don't feel inclined to return. I can see how a lot of people like this game, and how it inspired a lot of other games that took those ideas and did things significantly better. It's fairly linear and requires a lot of tedious back tracking. I wasn't particularly enthralled by the story, and the combat is a mixed bag. I didn't mess with psychic powers, because I never like those kinds of things, but the melee is clunky and the enemies are very much bullet sponges. I ended up just juking and jiving past enemies that constantly respawn, because it wasn't worth the frustration of wasting all my ammo on them. I did play with the texture packs, which were pretty decent. Didn't find it particularly horrifying, outside of opening a door and having an exploding robot on the other side, but I'm not super inclined to be scared of small noises and scream at everything like your average YouTuber. The entire time I was playing I was wishing the original Deus Ex games had a better control and shooting scheme, since everything else it does, it does significantly better.
This is the only one I've played in the series. I tried playing the game through on Vanilla, and I don't think I hit any bugs, and had zero crashes. Eventually I just couldn't take the poor accuracy of every weapon in the game. I managed to get probably halfway through and got a sniper rifle. Scoped in, I could fire and see the bullet actually hit 6 feet to the left from under 100 meters/yards. Every gunfight felt awful and enemies are much more accurate than you. There's a mod called Zone Reclamation Project that fixes a BUNCH of outstanding issues, bugs, and glitches, without touching any gameplay elements if that's your thing. Otherwise it also includes a bunch of optional mods, including a reworked gunplay one. Other than that, the game seems to be the easiest, so I'd recommend new players to start with this if you don't know what you're getting into.
So, first off the game is generally pretty great, but I hit a game breaking bug a few missions in and couldn't proceed. Essentially you escort a larger ship to a jump node, but once there somehow it isn't EXACTLY where it needs to be, so just ends up spinning around in place until you or it eventually dies. As far as I could tell, it's a common issue and doesn't have a remedy... EXCEPT... Freespace 2. There's a seriously dedicated group of nutjob fans out there that completely recreated Freespace 1 in the more advanced Freespace 2, music, story, voiceovers, videos, everything, AND it fixes the glitch. So.. consider this a good Samaritan PSA, this game might glitch out and the modding team for FS2 has remade it entirely along with other goodies like textures, lighting, custom resolution support, etc...
