I wanted to try this game, thankfully we have the free weekend now so i did try it out for about 7 hours ! My impressions is extremely good and i bought this immediately. There are alot of things to cover here but i won't list everything as it's not fully released yet so many things will be fixed.
The positives :
It's a mainly fast paced game so you jump to a sector of your choice, you do your stuff, you leave, then to the next one until you almost reach the end which is your hangar. If you want your progress to stay you can't live midway, you start and you finish. It's pretty fast so don't worry about it.
The visuals are good,the lighting is good. It doesn't look like a AAA game like star citizen,everspace 2 or similar but it doesn't need to be, the gameplay is the big hero here not the visuals but it looks good so no worries. The way you traverse from your ship, to empty space to a base is so much fun and fast ! Basically almost every time apart from few sectors or when you done with a sector you run constantly. It's not a difficult game and you can play it solo as your robot companion does all jobs another player could do and he does it well,shooting,collecting,repairing etc so don't worry about playing solo. You must be serious with your choices, if the sector says hard then it's hard but you can avoid it if you don't want too. The sectors are usually very small in length and makes it intresting instead of travelling for no reason.
The ship feels alive, you can interact with alot of stuff, even a jukebox playing music. Very nice design, i truly like it to spend time in there.
The fast travel hook is so much fun as well, makes things fast and efficient,
Some things that i noticed are missing :
Graphic control,it's very basic with your selection. I use a 5090 so naturally i want to crank everything to max but there aren't alot of graphic options,i guess because the game is light,the textures don't take that much processing.
There is no flashlight,it's usually very dark inside the ship ! Either gives us a flashlight or add alot of lights inside the ship.
The ship handling is fine,feels almost like everspace or X4 so no special flying skills required,i consider this an 80% FPS game than a space flying game. The ship acts like a home,although you can and you will do dogfights you want it or not i think the RND went to fps and there are alot to like there.
Something that is truly missing is button mapping for specific things. For example i want to fly my ship having th ROLL and PITCH on mouse and yaw on A and D but here you cannot set the ROLL on mouse. Very weird to me as i play 10 other space games that way,also strafe up or down between the player and the ship needs to be the same buttons which is weird as there are sections for the ship and the player speerately.
Something else i want to see is camera movement control or the lack of it. For example when you turn or boost or break there is too much movement for my style. I want a slider to adjust the movement similar to Everspace,ideally i want it full locker and ill decide when to look around. This can me implemented if the devs want.
There are way too many things we can analyse but we won't. Buy the game,especially now it's cheaper. Even at full price it's worth it. I play solo but i can only imagine how fun would be if you had 3 frineds to play with,there is a match making lobby on the main menu if you want to play with others but i don't like to play with people i don't know .
Great job devs,very different game than anything that contains space. For the price you can spend many hours here especially if you have friends to play and i will spend hours in this game. Hopefully i can progress all the way to the end without needed help from other players, please devs make sure it's balanced for single player
