Zloth
I smell a... wumpus!?
This game has eaten me alive for the past six weeks! It didn't get much hype, though, or at least little hype that reached me here in Kansas. Just a few quick trailers on GameTrailers to clue me in. So I'm going to hype it a bit myself.
The game is an Elite-style game with lots of space battles and even more space trading. It's also about the most anti-casual game I've ever seen in my life. The game never really tells you what to do. It's quite happy to offer you missions you can't possibly complete if you're foolish enough to try them. And, if you go and attack a massive fleet with a tiny fighter, you will not find yourself revived a few killometers away with all your stuff. You will be blown up and will need to re-load from your last save. A lot has been learned over the years about what not to do in a game to make it more appealing to the millions of casual gamers out there. I'm pretty sure Egosoft took that blacklist and pasted it straight in to their high priority requirements list.
The game does have quite a few bugs. The game only seems to allow one NPC voice at a time so you may miss out on important story information if a message comes in at just the wrong time. The autopilot sometimes gets confused and slams you into something much bigger than you are. If you start the game in easy mode, you can't complete the tutorial because you have no weapons. Some of the mission objectives are a bit wonky. Extremely busy sectors in the game tend to stutter, too.
If you can soldier on through the bugs, though, this is one heck of a game. I've never seen an empire builder this big before! I started in easy mode with one little trading ship and a tiny fighter (both unarmed). I parked my toothless fighter somewhere, did some trading, bought some nicer software for my trader, and started exploring - trading as I went to earn some cash. After a few days of that (did I mention that this game was big?), I bumped into an abandonded heavy fighter which I sold off for a ton of cash - enough to start a couple of factories up. Once I got those set up, I popped into that toothless fighter, bought it a couple of weapons, and started exploring some more. I earned more money, set up a few more factories, bought a few more ships, bought a pretty big factory complex, and so on. I'm still not done with the game but it's pretty clear from the story arc I have now that I'm going to need to build a galactic empire with one or two hundred factories plus ships to service them to complete it.
There's also the battle side of things. You start out with one little fighter but doing combat missions earns you cash (particularly if the enemy bails out and lets you take their ship) that lets you buy a bigger fighter, then maybe a corvette, then some more fighters to fly along with you, and so on until you have fleets of ships. I've really only scratched the surface on that side of the game, fighting nearly all my fights without a single wingman.
This is a very complex game. If you're looking for a game where you can blow up some aliens to blow off some steam, this isn't your game. The manual is 100 pages long and is still a bit short on information. Heck, I've been playing the game pretty hard for six weeks and I still ended up spending some hours on Saturday figuring out just how to use the huge Orca freighter I was finally able to afford. Many folks hate that but, for me, "still learning after six weeks" is the best compliment I can give a game. Even if some of the bugs are big enough to make me cry when they bite.
I don't think the game is available in stores in the USA but you can get it on Steam for $35.
A few screenshots....
The game is an Elite-style game with lots of space battles and even more space trading. It's also about the most anti-casual game I've ever seen in my life. The game never really tells you what to do. It's quite happy to offer you missions you can't possibly complete if you're foolish enough to try them. And, if you go and attack a massive fleet with a tiny fighter, you will not find yourself revived a few killometers away with all your stuff. You will be blown up and will need to re-load from your last save. A lot has been learned over the years about what not to do in a game to make it more appealing to the millions of casual gamers out there. I'm pretty sure Egosoft took that blacklist and pasted it straight in to their high priority requirements list.
The game does have quite a few bugs. The game only seems to allow one NPC voice at a time so you may miss out on important story information if a message comes in at just the wrong time. The autopilot sometimes gets confused and slams you into something much bigger than you are. If you start the game in easy mode, you can't complete the tutorial because you have no weapons. Some of the mission objectives are a bit wonky. Extremely busy sectors in the game tend to stutter, too.
If you can soldier on through the bugs, though, this is one heck of a game. I've never seen an empire builder this big before! I started in easy mode with one little trading ship and a tiny fighter (both unarmed). I parked my toothless fighter somewhere, did some trading, bought some nicer software for my trader, and started exploring - trading as I went to earn some cash. After a few days of that (did I mention that this game was big?), I bumped into an abandonded heavy fighter which I sold off for a ton of cash - enough to start a couple of factories up. Once I got those set up, I popped into that toothless fighter, bought it a couple of weapons, and started exploring some more. I earned more money, set up a few more factories, bought a few more ships, bought a pretty big factory complex, and so on. I'm still not done with the game but it's pretty clear from the story arc I have now that I'm going to need to build a galactic empire with one or two hundred factories plus ships to service them to complete it.
There's also the battle side of things. You start out with one little fighter but doing combat missions earns you cash (particularly if the enemy bails out and lets you take their ship) that lets you buy a bigger fighter, then maybe a corvette, then some more fighters to fly along with you, and so on until you have fleets of ships. I've really only scratched the surface on that side of the game, fighting nearly all my fights without a single wingman.
This is a very complex game. If you're looking for a game where you can blow up some aliens to blow off some steam, this isn't your game. The manual is 100 pages long and is still a bit short on information. Heck, I've been playing the game pretty hard for six weeks and I still ended up spending some hours on Saturday figuring out just how to use the huge Orca freighter I was finally able to afford. Many folks hate that but, for me, "still learning after six weeks" is the best compliment I can give a game. Even if some of the bugs are big enough to make me cry when they bite.
I don't think the game is available in stores in the USA but you can get it on Steam for $35.
A few screenshots....
