Jeffrey Spitz
Jan 27
Found new bugs?
Things I enjoyed (Know that on the whole the game was enjoyable and this is by no means a comprehensive list and are just some of the highlights): The lighting, sounds, voice acting, and models on the whole were excellent. It helps me feel immersed in the world. When working properly, enemies feel threatening. When my ship was boarded for the first time, I felt like I was being attacked on multiple fronts. The fire definitely added to the tension. It feels satisfying to line up the laser weapon to maximize the amount of damage done to enemy craft. It is also gratifying when I can loot the wreckage for extra money. Only being able to use certain weapons when the crew was manning certain rooms definitely added to the strategy of ship management. Also having crew members specialize in different rooms is a nice feature. The fog of war is a great way to build tension. Not knowing if you may be spending all of your action points only to end up facing down an enemy ship or just another asteroid. Bugs / Issues I encountered: The game itself runs slow on my laptop. I have an Intel Core i7 and Nvidia Geforce RTX 2080. And during movement and combat it struggled to run at 1920x1080p. The player should have the ability to tone down the graphics. There should also be an options menu available to the player in game so that they don’t have to exit out from their mission to the main menu to change audio or video settings. Sometimes my turn would automatically end when I use up my action points. Other times It would wait until I clicked the end turn button. When the game does not automatically end my turn, I am able to move crew to different rooms without spending action points. The laser beam itself is wonky to use. You have to guess to see how many tiles you can shoot the beam across (this should be told to you in the weapon description). Maybe a click and drag interface that turns red when you are too close or far would be more useful. Additionally the beam continues well beyond the displayed range and you can end up killing ships you couldn’t ordinarily aim at. You can zoom into and out of the ship using the scroll wheel but the spacebar shortcut isn’t aware of this. So I can start with the camera outside, zoom in with the scroll wheel inside but when I press the spacebar the camera zooms into the inside because it thinks I am still outside. Sometimes the ship says I failed to pull an object with the tractor beam even tho it is picked up by the ship. The player seems to be able to travel far beyond the boundaries of where the camera can go. Scanning asteroids seems to do nothing. The spacebar triggers the next dialogue, but it probably shouldn’t since it is also a navigation tool. The crew sometimes fails to path into rooms you assign them to. You have the ability to select crew members when the camera is outside the ship. This seems pointless since you can’t do anything from that view. Perhaps if you put health bars under them then the icons would be more relevant since you could use that data to make decisions. The ship can hit itself with its own beam weapon if you target too close and even when it looks like it shouldn't. Sometimes there is a large delay between the beam hitting a ship and the ship’s health going down. The tracked quests not completed in an earlier mission show up in later missions. When you reload a save those quests do go away. You can break the tutorial if you decide to destroy the first drone with the laser instead of the main guns. The characters do not react to it being destroyed when you kill it in that manner and the dialogue is stuck for a while until you start killing more ships that warp in. It was not communicated what happens when the ship is boarded. When I saw the enemy inside, I did not understand what it would do if left to its own devices. I also did not understand what I was putting at risk when deciding to direct my crew ]to the room the enemy was in. When I saw that my crew members lost a health bar I was searching for a way to heal them but there doesn’t appear to be a system / Items in the game that would get the job done. Even at the space station there was nothing in the shop I could use to heal my crewmates. After that I thought the next time my ship was boarded one of them was sure to die. The free action system is wayyy to overpowered. You can plan on spending 10 action points to move and then find that it was done for free. Same for a 10 point missile attack. Once I managed to move 20 tiles in a row for free. Perhaps a discount is in order instead of the whole cost paid off. Also It was not communicated what the odds were for characters to perform a free action so i couldn’t really anticipate it well. There are no real opportunities to use the blink move ability. It is always better to take double move speed and you usually go much farther. It is a little weird that the cooldown of weapons only advance if the character is in the room at the time. Maybe have it so the cooldown time is doubled if a character is not in the room. Having it not cooldown at all is a little frustrating. A small portion of the bottom of the screen is cutoff when running in windowed mode at 1920x1080. You cannot maximize the windowed game and the thickness of the bar at the top pushes some of it below the 1080 monitor. In the encounter where you help repair a ships engine, after the repairs are done, the ship should leave. Otherwise the player can immediately attack it after the repairs are fixed and they receive profit for fixing and looting the ship. The square map icon that calls the player’s attention to the yellow square sections overlays on top of the rest of the UI. Idk how but at one point one of my crew fell out of the space ship. When i tried clicking his crewmate icon to focus in on him it essentially crashed my game. An asteroid blowing up doesn’t always set off the gas clouds. Maybe its because the clouds only take into consideration where your weapons hit and the asteroid can be partially out of the gas cloud. Green boxes disappear when the ship is far enough away. However the box’s green ruing that pulses around it is still visible from any distance. Research should be included as part of the tutorial. I only found it when i was investigating the UI at the top a bit closer. Dragging items into and out of ship slots is not possible even when you have 1 action point left. I am just greeted with the “Not enough action points” message. After i looted the derelict ship, I received a log telling me the location of a cache. However I never found its location. Maybe this game needs a minimap with pings showing locations of interest and also help the player find their bearings. You can easily spot positions of enemy ships and asteroids through the fog of war. This is because they leave empty spaces on the hex grid when you turn on the move ability. The movement of the player ship is often erratic in a zig zaggy pattern even when traveling relatively straight. When you sell scrap parts, they seem to appear in the shop’s buy section. I don’t think these kinds of object should appear here because you can’t do anything with them. The character Lizzy says she knows reactor technology but her room specializations are in missiles and mines. Portions of the levels show a pink texture in place of the hex grid when trying to move. Enemy ships do not chase after you (and may not even take their turn) if you put enough distance between you and them. This allows the player to simply run in and out of engagements, patiently waiting for their shield to recharge before going back in. The camera clips through the large space station. The shop has upgrades like hacking and blinking but the player already has access to those abilities from the start of the game. It should be communicated to the player if a ship they are targeting is available to be hacked since it is such an expensive operation. Maybe ships should have hack health so even though hacking it once didn’t work hacking it a second or 3rd time would yield results. Sometimes the warp animation doesn’t go through when you activate it while viewing the inside of a ship. Sometimes when you shoot missiles, they do not hit their targets but instead orbit them really closely until they are extinguished and deal no damage. You can sometimes end your turn while a missile is in flight (while it is orbiting).
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