I picked this up for 50% off at GOG yesterday. I'm not disappointed.
Cortilian wrote: ↑Tue Aug 22, 2017 2:53 pm
Buatha wrote:The game has the "move along" element where you can't stay too long in a sector without being attacked. It was kind of a buzzkill for me since I like to look around, but I understand that was the design.
Yeah. This has really hurt the game for me. I understand it is intentional but I like to take my time looking around.
The timer kicks in after enough time that you'd really have to be dawdling to hit it. The first couple times I actually thought it was triggered by me not doing anything other than flying around. Maybe it gets shorter later on? I don't know. You get an alert and ample time to jump to the next sector.
Trying to ride out the timer is suicide. Like FTL - you stay ahead of the approaching wave of doom. Last night I stayed and fought, and while I killed the first two fighters that appeared, the next five got me.
So far the fighting is pretty smooth, and I could see where this might be fun in VR (disclaimer, I've never done anything in VR). It plays a lot like Freelancer with RPG progression and quick zone maps.
The premise is that you're a clone, trying to fight your way to find out where/who your "original" is as far as I can tell. You have a narrative AI guide that isn't too impressed with you. Each time you fly, you collect resources, cash, consumables, fuel, blueprints, and equipment. You can upgrade your ship on the fly while you're in space. Loot is very random, and can be found off dead enemies, inside crates scattered around the zones, trading with vendors, and by triggering some events - like hacking a beacon that provides you with a slew of crate locations.
The resources you collect on your journey are used to craft items from the blueprints you've acquired. Nothing of great value is easily craftable, and you'll have to scour several zones before you can make your first item. You can repair your hull and subsystems on the fly - but it takes Nanobots, which are the health kits of the game - and also relatively difficult to find.
You don't specifically need to kill everything, but it helps in finding loot.
Fuel is used to jump between zones, so you MUST eventually stop and search for it - found in some asteroids, some explosive containers, randomly from enemies, and in trade. It's cost around 25 out of 100 fuel for each jump. It seems entirely possible to strand yourself without gas, but you can jump with fuel shortages - you'll suffer damage as a result for an unstable jump.
Everything except cash and blueprints are lost when you die. Cash is used in between lives to apply permanent upgrades to your ship - whether it's more armor, more speed, more weapon space, more consumable space, better chances to Crit, unlocking trade vendors, buying better starting hulls, etc. Cash resets to zero before you head back out, so use it or lose it. The blueprints you find are permanent between deaths, and there's a lot to find judging by the number of slots to fill in that screen.
So far I've come up against one boss - a Corvette - that I couldn't beat, mostly because I started the fight with damaged weapons and shield systems and 30% hull.
The combat is pretty repetitious, and I'm already starting to feel some sameness in the zones - but that could be due to me not getting past the first four sectors more than once or twice. I've getting used to where things might be, too. A certain cluster of asteroids looks interesting, so I investigate and find I can mine a couple of them. Or I notice a blue electric-charged cloud and fly to it and discover I can harvest Plasma from it. Maybe in the distance I see a debris field, and I fly to check it out, discovering a few loot crates. The layouts are randomized, but there seems to be a somewhat limited number of set pieces I've seen so far. Again, I haven't made it very far, either.
I am doing better with each run out. I started with 6 kills before I died the first time. I was up to 28 by the 6th death. I'm enjoy it so far after playing for a couple hours. I didn't want to go to bed at 12:15am, but had to get up at 4:30 today.
The only bug I've found so far is that enemy-launched missiles can fly through asteroids. I thought I was being smart, turns out they have phase technology or something. This only happened a couple of times and isn't in any way consistent.