I tried this game over the course of a few days and for all the hype, I must say I'm really disappointed. Definitely not worth the money *yet* and by the looks of it, it won't be worth it any time soon...
It's trying to be Minecraft in space and it's failing badly at it.
Here are some of my biggest complaints:
- Crashing on exiting the game to menu.
- Long loading times and I don't know what's going on when you exit to menu - the menu doesn't show up for a while. You can hear the sound of moving the mouse over the buttons, though...
- The game isn't well optimized. Sometimes it runs at hundreds of FPS, sometimes is chugs along at 20 and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the complexity of the scene. Smooth for the most part, but at certain times it just gets the idea that now it wants to be an ass. Reloading the level fixes it.
- Interface is horrible. What am I saying? Beyond horrible. Click and drag is a pain - if often selects the item next to the one you're trying to drag, the inventory screen is very disorganized and everything is BLUE. My monitor supports 16 million colors, but I should have just bought a black-and-blue one instead
Once the ships get large, it becomes a pain to sort out the inventory - especially when it's time to move stuff from one container to the next. Yes, I know I can hold-and-scroll, but it's an awful lot of scrolling every time. Good thing I bought a 22" 16:9 monitor, so the inventory screen can take up 1/8 of the screen's surface area instead of the entire thing.
- The game itself currently has no purpose other than building and crashing stuff. It doesn't know what it wants to be.
- Given the limited number of goals a player can accomplish, the only thing that keeps the player interested is the very grindy, very slow progression of the game. Yes, I know I can turn stuff to 3x or 10x, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the game, doesn't it?
- Meteor showers. WTF is all I can say...
Meteors always come from one direction - the Sun as far as I can tell. So the most effective way of shielding your ships and stations is just by parking them behind an asteroid - in the shadow. That's nice, really. Of course, if you don't do that, your ship gets nuked every 5 minutes. If you're just starting out the game, you have no weapons yet capable of defending against the meteors and even once you're well into the game, you're highly limited by ammunition. When ammo takes a bunch of rare metals like Magnesium and Uranium that are VERY SLOW to refine, unless you kick the refinery into 10x, the only solution is to have a whole bunch of refineries working.
- Placing blocks is annoying as hell. For one, you have to have one quantity of the first resource in order to place blocks, which quickly degrades to running from one ship to the next just to make the layout happen. And second, you can only place new blocks by putting the cursor over the existing structure - which is very thin.
- Beyond the huge amount of resources one needs to gather or disassemble from other ships, this becomes a welding, grinding and mining simulator. The recent addition of ship based welder helps, but it's still quite a nuisance.
- Transporting items from one ship to the next is a horrible pain. You can do it manually - in which case you'll spend hours transporting everything. Or you could build a conveyor - collector system that spews items from one ship and into another. In which case you'll spend hours building the system and
- Weapons. Oh yea, about that...
There's no friend-or-foe system. There's no way to mark a ship as "yours" and indeed there's no way of preventing your own turret from shooting at you or sometimes even your ship. My first test of turrets ended with me being shot. My second test ended with my other ship being blown to bits. My third tested ended with my own ship firing on its own decoy... At this point the weapons are so horribly broken that I don't even know why they're added in the first place. Probably just an attempt to cash in on "creativity and weapons in space".
- AI? There is none. No, the enemy ships flying in a straight line and shooting at you doesn't count.
- Lighting: It wouldn't be the worst thing if the helmet light was brighter. The shadow cascades need some work - if you go far enough from an asteroid - not all that far - the shadow it casts will disappear. I understand that cascaded shadow mapping has its limits, but come on, you can try harder than that.
- Creative mode: Yea, that's nice. You can add blocks and your reactors function without fuel, but not your weapons. In fact, there's no in-game access to items in creative mode other than making them the way you would in "Survival mode".
- Survival mode: If you die, you respawn with a full set of tools and if your old spawning ship got badly damaged / destroyed, you get a new one. Deconstructing your ship and dying almost becomes a better way of mining resources than actually mining resources.
