What could had been a great space sim turned into frustration sim due to some strange design choises.
Spaceforce has two play modes, free sandbox type of play and a story mode, I chose the story mode since it seems to offer both kinds of gameplay. Spaceforce also throws some RPG elements in the mix, such as the weapon damage system and RPG type ship upgrading process. It all sounds good until you start the game, the opening cinematic is one of the lamest I've seen, but even that pales in comparison to the horrid dialogue and voice acting, the dialogue is so bad that it's not even funny, the comments coming out of the main character's mouth are so clishé that you start wondering if the game is supposed to be some sort of parody, unfortunately I don't think that's the case.
If that isn't enough to drive away the most determined space sim fans(such as I), the first mission might very well do it for you. Even tho you're only fighting few enemies, it's so sadistically difficult that I can only wonder what the devs were thinking when they made it, I personally tried it and failed around 5 times before finding the difficulty option hidden in your pilot statistics page, after changing it to easy I ”quickly” defeated the enemies....only to get stuck again, after browsing GS forums I found out how to proceed and the game really began.
Tho things got easier after adapting the controls and getting used to the combat system, some issues remained, such as the overlong dog fights. In Spaceforce defence is often the best offence, hitting the enemy ships is not very difficult, but the ship's main weapons do very little damage, and when you can use nanobots to repair armor and the shields are self recharging you're in for some long and boring fights. Add to this some cruising around while you wait for your jump engines to reload and you find yourself quickly thinking ”why be doing this unless someone pays me?” ..Devs also left some furiating bugs behind, like for e.g. the help screen appearing in the middle of the screen and refusing to go away if you've changed the keybinds, effectively forcing you to ”ctrl+alt+del” your way out of the game making you lose your progress, not to mention using joystick causes the accelator to get stuck on full etc.
Spaceforce does have some things working for it tho, the weapons are nicely designed, sounds are good(except voice acting), graphics and the visual sty-le are very pretty without bringing your PC down to its knees, combat involves some nice tactical details such as using bright stars to hide your ship, using correctly timed EMP burst to take down missiles, and having different types of weapons do varying amounts of damage to different materials. Controls, despite some possible bugs with joystick work smoothly when playing with KB+mouse configuration, but even tho I don't require my games to guide the player by the hand all the time, some tips on what buttons to press could had made the controls quicker to learn and the experience more enjoyable.
In the end the fact that us space sim fans don't have much choise in the genre might be the best argument for getting it, and is propably enough to force me to eventually return to it also, but unless you REALLY need a new space sim I advice you to steer clear of Spaceforce, there are definitely better games out there.