I had Elite Dangerous on my Steam wishlist for ages but it never dropped in price enough and many people complained that it’s pretty but rather boring. In the meantime, this little gem is both cheap and widely praised, including by Broken Forum’s space game aficionado, I decided to give it a whirl. It was basically made by only two guys working out of a garage.

It’s a standard space game the likes of which we’re familiar with since Elite, so I won’t go into that. The main limitation is that everything is limited to a two-dimensional plane. Little fighters and asteroids and such can sometimes fly by above or below your ship, but for the most part, the whole game takes place in a flat universe. This simplification extends to pretty much everything else. This is an arcade game, not a flight simulator, so there’s no power management, fitting parts to ships is easy, there’s no real physics system and so on. An excellent example of how simplified things are is docking: just fly close enough or directly into a space station and your ship automatically docks.

You fly so-called capital ships in the game, though the definition is stretched by having it range from tiny corvettes to gigantic dreadnoughts. One interesting quirk is that ships have three different weapon mounts. Turret-based weapons can swivel around and will usually be controlled by the AI, though they will be more effective if you manually control them. Secondary weapons fire out the sides of your ship and are untargetted. Options include flak cannons that hit fighters and missiles directly next to your ship or weapons like dumbfire rockets and self-targeting missiles. Finally broadside weapons also fire out the sides of your ship but must be carefully targeted and usually take some time to charge up. Of the three weapon types, I found that I relied on the turrets the most oddly enough.

Like other space games, there are three main activities: mining, fighting and hauling. Mining is boring as hell and probably no one will do it except that if you find a certain kind of asteroid, you can mine for a special commodity that sells very well. Hauling can be extremely lucrative given the right ship setup and many players seem to advocate doing this as the main way to make money. The fun part of the game of course is in fighting and I have to say that although it’s a very simplified system, the combat is rather addictive. The game very often pits you against surprisingly large fleets of enemy ships, so you have to prioritize targets, rotate your ship to present your strongest shields against enemy fire, judiciously use broadside weapons against large targets and so forth.

Personally I had the most fun and success in using nimbler,  faster ships. You’ll often find that they can stand up longer against enemies compared to slower, heavier ships because you can actually dodge some enemy fire and control engagement ranges better. It’s always fun to jam yourself up against the blindspot of a huge enemy dreadnought and hammer it relentlessly while taking relatively little damage in return. Shields in this game recharge relatively quickly which explains why a single ship, properly piloted, can hold out against a large number of enemies. For the same reason, squads of enemy fighters are often deadlier than enemy dreadnoughts. They can always close on you and hammer you no matter how fast your own ship is. If you survive the initial attack run, you can quickly cut them down but I’d died surprisingly often on the very first attack run.

The main story is weak stuff and surprisingly short. I was surprised that the game has a system for conversations with animated characters but then made so little use of it. I think that there’s also some imbalance between the first system you start in and the rest of the universe. You spend a lot of time in the first system before you’re allowed to leave. Consequently you end up getting to know it pretty well. The systems after that however seem pretty indistinguishable one from another. There’s a separate plot thread based around the Mercenary Guild but it seems to end abruptly with no real conclusion. I really wish the game had more fleshed out storyline missions that could help differentiate the systems more and flesh out the universe.

Reading around the forums, a fair number of people seem to be asking for DLCs or a sequel. There seems to be room for adding stuff like carriers (for the moment, you’re limited to hiring one mercenary wingman who flies a fighter, which is kind of odd as the size of your own ship steadily goes up), more storyline missions or special items. At the moment, some components are available only as drops and never in stores. Expanding on these options might be interesting. Unfortunately continued development seems to be dead though the demand indicates that its fans liked it well enough.

For my part, I’d say that this is a good example of a game that while not being innovative or ambitious, gets all the basics right enough that it makes for a solid, pleasantly enjoyable experience. I found myself constantly jonesing to finish just one more mission to build cash or rep, or to fly out to test a new ship or a new configuration of turrets. That is certainly a dependable sign that this is a good game.