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This game is very difficult in the beginning, it took me 3h to stop dying to basic enemies.
I'm still in the beginning but I already see that:
There is a lot of variety between enemy ships and factions.
Lots of weapons and modules to craft and upgrade.
Exploration is very fun, diffrent resources, containers, trading ships.
Combat is engaging, weapons are varied - we have diffrent primary and secondary weapons, booster and consumables.
I wasn't really sure if I was going to enjoy this, since I'm not a fan of rogue style games, but this is what's called a "roguelike". Which means you will die a lot (you are supposed to, it's part of the experience), but unlike pure rogue games, you will carry some progression with you to the next run. The way it works in this game is that you earn credits on each run, and then you can spend them on permanent upgrades to your character or your ship. You can also purchase new ships. Whatever you don't spend from your previous run is lost, so there's some fun to be had in optimizing your purchases after each run.
The visuals are absolutely gorgeous, and the various "biomes" and scenarios you find yourself in are fun and interesting. When you first play the game you'll be encountering something new on every run. After that you'll mostly be encountering new stuff as you progress further.
The controls are tight and responsive. It's a very action oriented experience, more akin to a first person shooter (very much like Descent if you've played that).
The only downside I can think of is sometimes the runs are too long. I've more than once wanted to play a quick game of this and ended up playing for more than an hour. You can always deliberately kill yourself and "cash out", but it's quite unsatisfying to do so.
The UI in some of the menus is one of the worst looking and functioning I've ever seen, other than that this is a great title, truly a blast to play if you enjoy games like this. Don't expect this to be a space sim though, it's an arcade action game and the mechanics work well enough for what it is, it's nothing special but it plays well enough. Same can be said about the progression system, it works alright. The main strength of the game imo is the pacing, the timer forcing you to keep progressing, the size of the areas you can explore, the RNG with the loot and enemies, it's all very well balanced and provide an intense rouguelike experience while still allowing you to progress steadily over time if you pay attention to what you're doing. Great game to play every once in a while.
My brother and I are in our 30s and my dad is in his 60s and all three of us play this game on either PC, Xbox or Switch and have a group text chat specifically about this game lol. It's fun and is always challenging. Just when you think you're good at it you get your ass handed to you and get humbled real quick
I didn't seek this out, I just happened across it in the GOG discounts feed, I'm completely blown away by how much I enjoy the gameplay loop of this game.
To me, flying and fighting in this feels very much like freespace/tiefighter and the like, no adjusting reactor output levels and shield allocations tho. I guess that's what some people are complaining about when saying it's "no spacesim"? To me this is not a deal breaker, since that similar decision making and complexity happens in this game in the form of passive, activateable and consumambe addon systems to your ships, which together with the time constrained resource gathering systems feels very satisfying.
Also I guess simulationwise it's kinda weird you can stop time in the heat of space combat to ponder which powerups to construct from the raw materials in your cargo, but I can't come up with a better system. If you couldn't craft stuff in combat, it would be infuriating to constantly feel like "I brought the wrong tools to this encounter" especially when enemies jump in triggered by you exploring.
Absolute 10/10 game experience for me, I feel bad for paying only 1€ for it. I'll wait for the discount to end and then buy the deluxe + expansion to compensate.
