I have no experience with the first game so I can't make any comparisons. td;dr: Buy if you LOVE dogfights. Pros - Music is superb and really helps with the atmosphere - Pretty good voice acting - Graphics are decent - Minigames are fun. I played pool more than I flew around (and I'll get to the reason why) - You can actually make enemy pilots give up the fight by taunting them! - Very nice ship editor Neutral - I personally liked the auto-track but for some reason this game lacked controls that you find in other space sims. There's no reverse thrust and you can't go up/down. - It's a game mechanic, but to get color coding on enemies you need to buy a radar upgrade. I've started too many fights I didn't want to by accident. - Pretty limited spaceship selection - Map is...meh - Story seems simple but interesting Cons - For the love of me, I couldn't find a way to get out of combat. If you get ambushed, you better be ready to fight or hope there's a friendly patrol nearby to help you because you CAN'T run away. The game won't allow you to jump away simply because you're in combat and the pirate are relentless. - The difficulty is a bit bonkers and the rewards are underwhelming at best. I've finished bounty hunts with barely any profit because of the damage I took during the fight (yes maybe I suck but that's my experience). And the fights themselves are all over the place. If the enemy has homing missiles, get ready to spam the roll/ECM button and hope you survive enough to slowly chip them down. Also (not 100% sure about this) the enemies scale with your ship 'rank', and your rank increases with each upgrade. So if you get extra cargo space, your enemies will get tougher, which makes no sense. Because of all of the above, I simply found the game too stressful to play. Every time I wanted to travel, I would dread an ambush or a fight. I would go from station to station because that's the only place you can save your game. I simply didn't have any fun.
After playing the game for a bit I can't really say I recommend it for this price. - The game is extremely shallow. There are some interesting 'events' happening but for the majority of them you'll get a generic bonus. After the first 1-2 games you're probably going to ignore the flavor text and just click next, get the reward and go on. - Very limited without DLC and each DLC by itself adds very little content. This really feels like a game cut into pieces and sold separately. There are free mods that add more content than the DLCs... And since I mentioned mods : most of the modding scene seems to revolve around steam workshop so you might not even get those (Paradox's mod site is a joke at this time. Not sure if they are investing into it). There are ways around this but they are a pain and kinda shady so it's up to you. - The races have no real diversity (Especially if you don't get some DLC ones). The same anthropomorphic entities everywhere. And with genetic engineering you can literally make ALL races the same - Tech tree always ends up the same. You might take different paths but you'll never play a game where, let's say, you only get kinetic weapons or only laser weapons. In general each game is pretty much the same thing with different minor events (and due to point 1, you will quickly get tired of them too) - The tutorial SUCKS. All in all, only buy this game if you have a sci-fi itch that you cannot scratch and you're the type of person that buys very few games and gets heavily invested into them. The game is the 'make your own rules' type of game where you might decide to be a peaceful technocrat in one or a xenophobic slaver in the next and make your own fun. PS: If you decide to lookup gameplay online, keep in mind how many DLCs the person that's playing has installed and how much money you'll have to invest to get the same result. The game you buy might not be the same as the one you saw. Also, they fixed end-game performance issues.
Ok I'll try to keep this simple. The good - Beautiful graphics. - Cool idea - Gameplay is nice and challenging The biggest issues the game has are - NO MANUAL SAVES. You cannot save (and load) the game whenever you want. I could go on and on why this is a horrible idea but there's no point. I don't know if the devs this this makes the game more challenging or whatnot but that's just a bad design. If you're ok with that then you might like this game. - Game gets repetitive really quickly. Seriously whenever you start a new game YOU WILL ALWAYS DO THE SAME THING! Build 3 tents. That's it. Nothing ever changes. - The videos might make you think that you are building an empire, trying to survive the apocalypse etc. That's not how this game works at all. Every session is like a survival game and is unrelated to any other session. They added a campaign but it's pretty much the same with an added technology tree and some hero missions. This is not a 4X game. You see those bots patrolling a nice city? That's not happening. All your army will be at choke points trying to survive. And it's EXTREMELY hard to recover if you city even slightly overrun. - The tech tree is pretty limited. - Hero missions are extremely frustrating. All you do is move around a map, kill zombies that keep re-spawning and gather items. Oh and there is no way to highlight which items to pick. You hover over everything until it turns into the 'gear' icon. Yeah... Honestly I could forgive everything else because I believe the game has potential and I really like the idea. However the devs' decision to not allow manual save really ruins the fun for me. I would normally give it one start simply because I don't want to play this game any more but I have faith in them. I really regret buying this game in it's current state. Hopefully their next attempt (They are trillions?) will be much more fleshed out (or they actually update this one). I'll try to keep this review updated if the game changes.
