"A wasted opportunity." It's criminal to take a game with so much potential and torpedo it in s
What's really amazing is how much effort went into the game on the basic stuff -- engine, art, etc. -- and how little effort went into directing this to a great gaming experience. In the grand scheme of things, it takes relatively little money to hire a good writer/designer, compared to the rest of the investment. If only they had done that, this game would absolutely sing. As it is, it sinks like a stone.
The game really does not play well. There's a lot of unpolished and apparently untested aspects of the game. For instance navigation is very difficult/tedious. You cannot set way-points or ride in trade-lanes, autopilot doesn't work, and it takes like 5-10 minutes (in real time) for the jump drive to recharge. So traveling from point A to point B is about as tedious as sitting there watching a large file download from the internet.
It's difficult to believe that the game was beta-tested before it was released. The excuse has been that the publisher rushed the game towards the end, but that doesn't explain the horrible choices they made about the writing. Being rushed doesn't imply that you'll hire somebody who is horribly under-qualified and incompetent.
They hired an incompetent 19-year-old student with zero experience to do the entire mission design and writing. He did even worse than you'd imagine. Here's the mission outline for the first two missions of the main campaign:
Mission 1:
Perform a dogfight against two ships. (highly difficult)
Perform a "scan" five times in a row. (highly tedious)
Mission 2:
Perform a dogfight against one ship.
Yes, that's it. Zero thought went into this. I'm not even going to get started on how bad the writing is. As another reviewer said, "A Saturday morning cartoon looks like Hamlet in comparison with the story." (Brett Todd -- gamesradar.com)
There's no tutorial of any kind, so learning how to deal with the command interface is slow and awkward. And even once you get good at it, it's still awkward, which again suggests that it wasn't well tested. For instance, every time you tractor in some goods (from a kill), you have to go to the inventory menu to select which ones you'll keep. There's no way to select "take all" by default. So every single kill essentially requires a tedious menu to deal with.
Some may believe that a patch will fix major problems, but the major problems are so major that this is exceedingly unlikely. They would have to rewrite the entire campaign, for example. That's not something one can simply patch.
The game is badly balanced. On discussion boards everywhere people are complaining that it's really difficult to win the very first battle. This is because the developers didn't try to make the game playable, let alone enjoyable. (From a game-design point of view, the first mission is supposed to show you how to play the game; it's not supposed to be a highly difficult trial.)
From a "bare simulation" point of view, the game is playable, and a patch might even make it enjoyable in a very limited sense, although the stuff that *badly* needs fixing will never be fixed by a patch.
But even if the game becomes playable, I recommend boycotting the game. Developers need to learn that it's not cool to destroy a game with so much potential. -- That post-purchase concerns like "fun" are as important as pre-purchase advertising. The writer needs to be fired immediately. And the person who hired him needs to be shot at dawn.
The business model which produced this game is something like "ecstatic customers and deeply disappointed customers are paying customers all the same." If you buy it, then their business model works, which means future business ventures will follow this model. Next year there will be a deeply disappointing game which could have been great if only a little extra investment went into it. It would be nice if, when they're doing their cost-benefit analysis, they get the feeling that the benefits of producing a good game outweigh the extra cost. -- There's only one way to vote in this contest: with your wallet.
If you buy the game, your vote is cast in favor of de-prioritizing and under-budgeting game-play, design, writing, and indeed beta-testing. Somehow I don't think you want that.
In any case, do not even consider buying this game until you have tried the demo! You'll easily see from the demo how badly the game is designed.