Fractal Softworks Forum
Other => Discussions => Topic started by: vagrant on June 26, 2019, 06:33:34 AM
-
I've had this game in my library for about a year but only a few days ago committed some brainpower to learning how it works and I'm really happy I did.
Features as I've experienced them:
-It's a space pilot sim, with a fairly large number of ships.
-Ships range from fighters to frigates (as far as I've seen) and each ship is fairly unique to pilot
-Variety of missions and activities (trading, escort, patrol, mining, racing are what I've seen)
-Overworld/strategic movement layer for moving between stations / intercepting fleets, etc
-Fleet building and customization
-Hot swap between fleet ships at any time to pilot them
-Swap to turret seats and let your crew pilot the ship
-Set turrets to auto or manual (really satisfying watching railguns blast someone automatically)
-On demand slow motion / tactical pause accessible from anywhere
-Tactical view for fleet command in battle
-Sandbox as well as story starts to the game. (I haven't touched the story at all, just been enjoying playing sandbox missions)
-Faction system I haven't figured out yet
-Steady progression and flexible difficulty, really gives you options for how you want to build your fleet immediately.
-Mod support and modding community (seems like there are multiple mods already available on the steam forums but I haven't played around with them yet)
-Active development (but already well fleshed out), developer seems really engaged and thoughtful.
Has anyone else played this, or have any thoughts on it?
-
I recorded a quick gameplay demo around a minute in length of a patrol mission dogfight in a light fighter if anyone is interested.
Void Destroyer 2: Quick Patrol Dogfight (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js71zwTCpqk)
I also recorded a short escort mission in a larger ship in third person, sorry about bleh quality.
Void Destroyer 2: Short Escort Mission (https://youtu.be/OkE3661TP-Y)
-
Overall, I felt like it was a bunch of content and an OK UI, which had a few great concepts and ideas.
But it just didn't quite gel for me. It looked like it was going to be like Freelancer, and I was all excited, until I realized that:
1. The AI's dumb. Not just kind of dumb, but dumber-than-a-box-of-rocks dumb.
2. Auto-turrets make things kind of ridiculous, because you can kite the dumb AI.
3. Combat ranges are terrible; they're so long-ranged that there's no point in most of the things that should make games like this good (see 1 and 2).
4. It doesn't get better as you progress, it actually gets kind of worse. And grindy, too.