When you're an indie developer with only a kickstarter budget you have to accept you can't compete with the AAA behemoth companies at everything. The way to make it work is to pick what you're good at, find your niche, and focus on that. Which Rockfish have done really really well. Rather than investing huge amounts of money into character models and adding walking / FPS elements, they've said no this is a game where you explore a universe packed full of things to do, in a small spaceship, with plenty of action, and some RPG-esque development. In an engaging SP campaign with a decent storyline. So the cutscenes are done with comicbook-style drawings, and you can't get out and walk around. BUT it was a worthwhile cost saving to focus on what this game does well. The customisation in the controls is unparallelled, so whether you prefer mouse/KB/gamepad/flight-stick/HOTAS, or a combination of any of those, you'll be able to find a way that fits your preferred style perfectly. You can also adjust the difficulty, and the autoaim, to suit whether you want to just cruise through it for the experience or make it as challenging as you like. There's a nice range of enemies, the action sequences are fun and varied. Plenty of things to interact with in the environment. And you have a range of different types of guns, consumables, upgrades, crafting, abilties, etc to make the technicals interesting and exciting. You also have a variety of different ships to choose from all with varying pros and cons in the technical details. And a loot, merchants, storage, and inventory system which is a pleasure to manage. Despite not having the budget left for full digital characters, they've still put a lot of effort into story. The comicbook-style drawings are done really well, the voice acting is very good, and the timing of intercoms and cut scenes is spot on. It's enough to make you feel like you're there for a reason, to really immerse yourself in the fictional universe.
Everything feels natural, intuitive, challenging, & fun. It's difficult but in a really enjoyable way. It deserves to be a lot more popular. It's not even really my type of genre, but even i'll make an exception for this. There's also so many settings to tailor your experience to how you want it to be.
Kept all the brilliance of the original but improved on it. When i saw they were remaking this, i really hoped they'd do a good job but didn't get too much hope up. Well I was extremely surprised when it was actually released, and it'a better than i imagined. One of the things i love is how you can pause it and change game speed - which makes it really strategy not just "who can click the fastest" like most RTS. For a change this really is strategy, you really need to think about what you're doing. And there's so many things to keep you on your toes - building, resources, trading, espionage, relationships, haven't got time to cover all of them. Must've taken tremendous effort to get so many things working so well together. I like the fairly historically accurate elemnt of it too - these are real historical provinces / cities / countries. They shift a bit as the game goes on but it still gives you a rough idea of the historical landscape of Europe. Most of the game is fairly accurate too, really gives you a feel for the complications of all the subtle, and less subtle, elements of competition between the nobility back then.
Many reviews ctiricise their attempt at merging a very long grinding adventure game with roguelike, arguing that the two don't really go together. Roguelike's are OK when you're spending 5 to 30 minutes each time before dying, but when you spend hours or days just to be picked off by some random chance which there was nothing you could do about is frustrating. Like in many adventure games and RPGs, there is a certain amount of grind to it, travelling around building up your skill/money/items; and this doesn't sit well with randomly dying and having to start again pretty much from scratch. I'd agree with all that. However it's worth pointing out that you don't HAVE to play this rouguelike. You can disable autosave, and just save at regular intervals, then when you do get caught out by random chance, or fall foul to something in this unfamiliar world which you had no way of expecting, you just restore your last save and carry on. You could even open up cheatengine and top up your echoes to make the grind a bit easier. I'd never cheat in a multiplayer, but this is a storyline game to me, it's something you play to enjoy and be immersed in. There is a challenge to learning the world and what to trade etc, but it is very unpredictable and unforgiving so I didn't see the harm in a little top up. I agree that the roguelike elements don't suit this type of game. But that aside it's a wonderful game to get lost in the immersion of it all, and I'd thoroughly recommend giving it a go.
