Caltrops - Article Submissions - I was bored, then I keyboard flipped

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by fabio 11/20/2017, 6:03am PST

Whoever designed the targeting reticles is fired. You get big, colorful arrows when something is off screen, then when it's on screen it...disappears. Oh wait, if you squint real hard you can make out a super tiny reticle set to 80% transparency. More than half the time I can't spot them unless I already know they're there from the arrows. I'm constantly spinning around to see if hidden targets go offscreen and I finally get an arrow I can actually see. Also hammering the middle mouse button because manual targeting is often the only way to tell if there are enemies.

Tutorials: fired

The game never told me how jump signal jamming works the first time it happened.

Next attempt, it tells me how to find the source them I'm left shooting it with nothing happening before enemy ships warp in and kill me.

3rd time, it finally tells me I have to touch the things to hack them because why would blowing up a fragile radar dish work?

I make it to sector 3 for the first time. Unbeatable boss fight! Because the story demands this character not die yet.

2nd time reaching sector 3. Boss fight just doesn't happen this time, because "story".

Reach sector 5 (6?) for the first time. Managed to pick up what is apparently the best gun in the game (shock rifle pro), then I jump into this system and am faced with an enemy frigate which is also jamming the jump signal. I circle strafe it, sloooooowly depleting its health bar. It's down to about 20% health when a ton of enemy fighters and capital ships warp in, instantly vaporizing me. I go look up how to beat that, and apparently capital ships have nodes located on different parts and all of them have to be destroyed before the ship will die. Thanks for not telling me yet again how to deal with something the first time I encounter it, game. I even suspected at the time that there might be multiple targets on large capital ships, but tapping the target key didn't do anything.

Fuck it. This sums up my experience with this game. I don't want to keep grinding through runs until I've finally triggered all the story cutscenes and tutorials that will actually let me beat the thing on future runs.

(I don't think I've ever been so unexcited getting loot in a game before. It's even worse than Invisible Inc in that regard. If universal ammo sucks, then the inverse is true for building resources. Keep it to a simple single resource. Remember how excited you were to pull into a shop in FTL with a ton of money saved up? In Everspace I have 500 scrap, 80 crystal, 90 ore, 5 processors, 70 gas, 20 dark matter, 60 plasma, and pulling into a trade station lets me....convert the dark matter to dark energy? yay? The person who designed the upgrade and crafting menus is fired too!)

Someone said it best when it comes to resource bottlenecks in space scavenging games.)

Mischief Maker wrote:

Every review of this game you find on the internet calles it the all time #1 must-buy OMFG SPLORT indie game. Let me assure you that this is not true. A cool concept -Sinistar meets the RTS portion of Giants meets ship customizability- but it fails in execution. The main thing that shoots this game in the face is the shitty keyboard-only controls (or joystick, if you can get the damn thing to detect yours) and its choppy physics system. What then puts a few more bullets into the game to make sure that it’s dead is the fact that there’s a “right” way to build your custom fighter and any major deviations will result in you being unable to fight or running out of power after the first salvo, the fact that there are 3 pastel colors of resource crystals you need and you can end up harvesting an entire sector but still have your research stalled because you’re short purple crystals, and finally the fact that your mothership is much better at fighting than you while you are much better at harvesting, turning the game into a tiring chore of blasting asteroids hoping that this time it’ll reluctantly drop a crystal of the color you need.