Between the Stars

The game controls horrible. The way you have to steer your ship just feels wrong and there has been put no effort in at all as to how you control the weapons. Along with that, you feel so far away from things. Even in RTS games you feel closer to your units and the action.

A game that allows you full flight movement, as you dish out punishment to the evil people that had a heatstroke. "Between the Stars" is a game where combat and flight feels like the arcade version, but it's main focus is actually the story in the campaign. The tutorial brings you into a short story of how the Solar Empire attacks the Interstellar Republic, which results in a loss to the Republic. The actual story begins with you creating a character (kind of goofy character design) who is a captain in the Republic and soon after you end up in the whole mess trying to shift the balance and fight back the Solar Empire. The story has some voice over mainly in space battles, but it's heavily texted without voice during non battle situations. The story takes place on stations, planets and various places where you make a ton of choices and some of these choices are based on dice throws. The game use dice throws for crew fights and some story branches where failing the dice can actually change the course of the story. You have various captain and crew attributes for this, but they don't benefit the actual dice. Instead you have more dice being tossed during the check, when you have higher attributes. Your captain can attain various attributes from choices. They come in positive, negative and "neutral" versions. The neutral type has a good bonus, but also with a downside. You have a select amount of crew mates active in your ship and they benefit anything from weaponry, defences, crafting and more. You have plenty of options to buy better ships as you move on. Some ships are more bulky with plenty of hardpoints for weaponry, while others have less hardpoints, but are more agile and fast. There are various utility hardpoints like radars for increased accuracy, mine layers and "flak cannons" to shoot down incoming missiles. Your main weaponry comes in 2 versions. Guns or missiles. Missiles are fairly easy to use, but can be shot down by enemy anti air defences. Guns require you to manually aim ahead of enemies, but are way more powerful especially in the later stages. Your ship has "power management" that allows you to react differently on the battlefield. This allows you to forward more power to guns, shields or speed. You can also change to have less on speed and then even out the rest on shields and weapons. The game appears to offer multiple playthroughs based on your choices, as some of these choices have an impact from start until the end of the game. There are some slight issues here and then with the game. I had some various stuttering when moving towards Solar Empire territory, especially when warping. Not much appeared to help when messing with the changes. Some achievements appear to not function. I had an achievement for unlocking 10 ships, but the 5 ships achievement did not unlock. Crew members can enter a state of gravely wounded depending on choices, but for some reason their state can bounce on to another crew mate, including some who you have in reserve. Some reviews indicate that docking is an annoying thing, but it's not really an issue. You can control the speed on your ship and all you need is line up next to the docking bay. A green triangle will appear in the area when you are close enough and when it's bright green, you set your ship to full stop and it autodocks. Overall a decent experience.