First impressions of Space Rift: Episode 1
Low low budget game. It looks very basic with the worst black level so far. I don't understand what's so difficult about setting black to black. Grey space isn't very spacy. Looking around in 'dark' areas makes the screendoor effect stand out more than in any other game I've played. The game has no loading screens, with pretty lengthy loading times, which means you're simply staring at a dark grey nothing in total silence. No spinning wheel or any other indication that the game hasn't crashed...
The audio from the onboard ship computer is messed up. It could be intentional yet it sounds more like it's clipping over the surround channels. The screen has a weird tic or flicker in it too every so many seconds, very distracting. You can't move around on board the mother ship, instead you look at a viewpoint and press x to go there. However then you have to turn your head 180 degrees to go back... Either get up off your seat or recalibrate the screen looking 90 degrees right, then look 90 degrees left for the viewpoint, and recalibrate again while looking forward, ugh. The screens in your own ship also ask you to look a bit too far down to activate them, as well as having to look a bit too far up for the buttons on the overhead panel. My neck hurts, this game needs eye tracking.
Flying around in space, the sense of scale isn't really there. Space combat is very basic. Compared to this, No Man's sky is a top ace space fighter...
Yet after all that it does have a certain B-movie level charm, creating good atmosphere with some decent music. I still want to play more to see where it goes but it's a shame it didn't get some more polish. 
Space is red and there's no black. (Actually looks a lot darker in screenshots, it's a dark grey haze in the headset)
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