I had never played the first GSB and was coming into this game pretty much blind, just having watched the trailer. Overall the game is pretty good, probably not worth $25 but maybe $15. Also there are some technical flaws, usually in the form of crashes. Visuals are good and bad. The good is the scale of the battles and the feeling that every ship is trying to do something. Laser blasts and missiles flying around...it's great fun. However you're restricted slightly in your zoom-out capability which means you can't always take in the whole breadth of the battle. I had issues playing at certain resolutions but native was fine. The ships look great by default but are fully customizable (read: completely customizable) as far as exterior design. I didn't bother with this system too much because the ships look finely detailed right out of the box. Gameplay was so-so for me. During the battles, you have absolutely no control over what the ships do. You can give somewhat detailed orders in the beginning but that's pretty pointless on a battle you haven't played before because you're going to have no idea how things will go. There are a ton of weapons and modules to customize your ship designs which, unfortunately, all seem to act pretty much the same within the categories. There are 8 pulse lasers, 8 missile types, 8 beam lasers etc. but it's hard to tell what's better, even with the comparison system provided. Sound is good, you can feel the weight of the missiles ripping through enemy ships' hulls. Some people may consider the sound somewhat muffled but to me it's a good representation of what a massive battle fought in the vacuum of space might sound like. The music is good as well, and provides appropriate ambiance for what's happening. I could see myself coming back to this game occasionally in the weeks and months to come. I experienced a few crashes, but the game's charm and dedication to the concept make it generally worth your while.
I bought this game on impulse without reading many reviews or following the early access hype. The game scores points for visuals, writing and theme, but loses for mechanics (particularly inventory mechanics) that are needlessly obtuse and uninteresting gameplay. The game is visually impressive and has a rich, interesting aesthetic. From the towns to the mysterious locations across the Unterzee (kind of annoying seeing 'zee' and 'zailor' all the time) to the monsters, there is plenty to look at. However most of the time you're actually doing something, you'll be looking at either your ship or the interface, which are both not visually compelling or really even adequate. The interface is overcomplicated, which is mostly a factor of problems with the mechanics. The ships look like standard ship sprites, nothing special. The writing is occasionally annoying, and the text is too small even at lower resolutions. Maybe if I had played it for longer I would stop being confused, but the adherence to consistency within the world left me wondering what the hell people were talking about most of the time. The overall theme is definitely prevalent, so while you might not be able to parse a particular sentence referring to made up words you aren't yet familiar with, you can pretty well get the gist of what's being said and the consequences thereof. Where this game stumbles is with the inventory and "stuff" mechanics. Not only does everything have an indecipherable name and indecipherable use, but there is way too much stuff and no real categorization. You might defeat a monster at see and have the option to harvest its meat or its shell. If you take the meat, you get some supplies (generic food stat). If you take the shell, you can trade it in later for money. I explained that simply but under a coating of indecipherable text, you aren't really informed enough to make a decision. It feels like Dark Souls' inventory system, not in a good way. Buy it? Maybe.
This game was fun for about 20 minutes; I was excited to find a game that seemed to have everything I wanted as far as management in a unique scenario. My excitement soon turned to dismay as I realized I had already explored all the content in the game in the amount of time it will take you to read this review. I buy a lot of games on GOG after looking at the reviews, but I also buy a lot on impulse based on nothing but the title, the box art and the first sentence of the description. I really wish I had read the reviews in this case. This game is tepid, uninteresting and devoid of features. It is almost certainly a mobile game heavily reliant on exploitive microtransactions that was converted to a standalone PC release with a similarly exploitive pricepoint. Knowing what I do now, the game is worth maybe watching a 30 second commercial for, certainly not the $15 I accidentally shelled out for this garbage. Meanwhile, the publisher and management team of this game are laughing all the way to the bank, perhaps not realizing they've slaughtered the golden calf of cheap game creation. Producing a game like this, so utterly lacking in content, innovation or even anything interesting to do after half an hour, and pricing it at a hefty $15 when free games are usually of higher quality, is detrimental to the entire game industry. I certainly won't be buying anything else from this publisher or these developers, and I'll be more leery with my dollars in the future. If we don't buy garbage games, they won't make them. In purchasing this game, I feel like I made a horrible mistake.
