Gets old very quickly. An MMO grind poorly packaged in a bugged, unfinished single player game

User Rating: 4.2 | Space Force: Rogue Universe PC
By eric1000 | Review Date:
This game had and still has the raw potential to be top of the tree space shooter / trading game aka elite. Unfortunately that is all it has, potential. Once again the current plague of the PC games market has raised it's ugly head and another far from finished game hits the shelves. Normally this is the fault of publishers and unreasonable deadlines, men in suits who's only motivation is the width of their ever growing wallets. With Spaceforce: Rogue Universe however I think the developer also needs to shoulder some of the responsibility as many of the small and extremely annoying bugs hit you in the face after only a couple of hours playtime. Bugs such as commands and functions that quite simply do not work as intended and a few that do not work at all. One major, game breaking bug causes the entire right side of the screen to turn white when closing on some mission objectives. This can be fixed temporarily by jumping back to the station but will only happen again as soon as you attempt to once again head for the mission. This particular bug has not yet appeared in the story missions but seems quite common with the side missions.

Flaws also exist in the game design. Flaws such as being able to take missions for a certain faction that involve you attacking one of that factions structures and was handed out in that factions space station. Okay this may seem petty but the fact that an EMD station hands out a side mission to destroy an EMD spacedock in order to greatly aid the UF ( the EMD's greatest enemy) does smack realism in the face with a wet fish.

Perhaps the greatest flaw in the game design however is one that would immediately be familiar to any MMO player, the existance of the dreaded grind.

In order to advance it is essential that you upgrade your ship with better weapons, armour etc. or indeed buy a newer, bigger and more powerful ship. No problems there but how it is achieved involves either hours upon end of smacking one asteroid after another to gather saleable materials or smacking one pirate ship after another to nick his cargo. I should also point out that the mining option involves the purchase of special mining tools that wear out with each successful attempt, which is clearly a money sink that the developers felt was needed but honestly it wasn't and just adds to the monotony.

Now if the grind mentioned above was restricted to the freeform game then fair enough, that really isn't the essence of the game and gives people something to do once they have cracked the main campaign. Unfortunately it is also an integral part of the campaign itself which is a very bad thing and a serious design flaw. A few missions in and doing well when all of a sudden the next one is so far out of your league that it's in the next universe, which leaves the player not only blown into a million space particles but back on the treadmill. Hit rocks, hit pirates, sell stuff, hit rocks, hit pirates, sell stuff, add points to something ..... rinse and repeat.

Overall Spaceforce: Rogue Universe is a mediocre, unfinished and badly designed product. Buy it only if there is nothing else out there and you really really need a fix of pixelated tedium.

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