famousringo said:
Even the combats stay the same, you're never going to have a battle without boarders and I only found the one zombie encounter where you weren't firing on an enemy ship. You can't fire strategically at the enemy, such as in FTL, and the firing minigames stink. You can't ever board the enemy ship. Furthermore, the combat is tedious with micromanagement. Why the hell is it not enough for me to wait for a system to charge before using it, I need to manage tokens to activate the system? Tokens which for some reason aren't generated without my explicit command, and are stored alongside very out-of-combat upgrade tokens. Boarder combat might be more tolerable if unit movement wasn't so incredibly tedious and the strategy didn't devolve into simply bundling your units all together. A lesser crime is a disjoint in the artwork. It's weird to see pixel characters standing in front of non-pixel backgrounds. The music is good. I'll give it that. Otherwise, I find little redeeming about the game. |
Obviously there are things they could do to make the game more diverse or increase the depth of strategic choices, but the game is $3. How exactly do you want them to focus on exploration of space without making the game extremely slow and boring? You already fly all over the galaxy and even into fictional galaxies but to manually fly and explore these places sounds like a terrible idea. The storyline did touch on philosophy and politics pitting one groups ideology against another groups idealogy on how the humans can stay strong as a species, as well as managing interaction with two species that hate eachother(like the politics of dealing with Isreal and Palestine)
I think the design of the fights were meant to mimic the chaos of an epic battle and less to do with strategic depth. I found it a very refreshing take. Things like collecting tokens and not having crew members automatically chase down and kill enemies is what created this sense of chaos in the battles because you had to manage everything. Although they are kind of cheap ways to create this chaos, it did work. I'm sure as more time is given the battle system will be fine tuned, but the goal is to create chaos and making things easier to manage actually is a negative in terms of value not a plus. The boarder combat is not meant for you to devise some indepth strategy system to outsmart the enemies. It's meant for you to be managing that, but while you are doing that you have to manage your engineers to repair your ship and while they are doing that you have to manage your token productions in the various rooms and while that is going on you have to remember to fire your weapons and the impact of your damage is determined by accurately timing your button presses. Not a single element of the game is difficult on it's own, but having to manage all of them collectively is what makes the game fun. If everything was done for you and you didn't micro manage the ship you would be left with nothing to do but watch your crew members fight. That doesn't sound very fun. I'm sorry you didn't like the game though. You were obviously looking for a completely different type of game.
