NeonXSZ

This game was made by one person and it shows. On the good hand, the core idea is solid. Alongside excellent 6DoF flying, including cool stuff like a true zero-G environment with floaty retained momentum and shots sending you backwards, this is also a decent customizable mecha sim and absolutely engaging to the point where hours fly by. For some players, this could be a 300 hour game. On the other hand, the majority of that time is spent wandered a giant, very simple map doing odd jobs and level grinding. The overall experience is empty open world “numbers go up” tedium. I felt compelled to play, to see if the game might grow and change, but my hopes were not rewarded. Hours flew by because so little happened and for the whole middle I couldn't wait to move on, then the final station had painful mazes and an uninspired end screen. If you've played Retrovirus, this digital world feels like it was made by the same people at both a grander and simpler scale. You start in a basic ship which you modify and upgrade over time. Most changes can be freely reversed, encouraging you to try different ship types. All of the weapons use your energy for ammo, but the results don't feel balanced into meaninglessness like in Retrovirus. The weapons come in a great variety with a mix of pros and cons. There are strong but slow firebolts, short-range energy-hungry lightning, plasma orbs with a splash effect, shotgun cannons and more … though once I got the quick-hit big guns, nothing else seemed as good. Secondary weapons range from high-damage dumbfire rockets to mid-damage homing missiles, with several that debuff foes as well. Hulls are differentiated by how many turrets and part slots they have, along with basic stats which can be upgraded to a certain point. There are hulls with better starting stats to discover, but almost any hull could be used for as long as you want if you like the look. As you level up, the difference in speed between light and heavy ships gets wider, so you'll be switching back when required for certain challenges and tasks. To build stronger gunships, you explode foes. They drop Nanotubes (which are used to overclock part slots) and loot data which gives you some percentage of all the parts they had equipped. If you destroy a ship with a better engine than yours, you are some percent closer to installing that engine yourself at a garage for free. New guns can be used immediately, and newly-discovered hulls get equipped at special garages. Overclocking boosts every part placed in the slot but only for that hull, with diminishing returns as the cost rises, plus overclocked parts are heavier and use more energy. When you need to level faster and have a part / weapon / hull partially discovered, you can buy them fully in a shop at a discount. Part discovery slows down the higher it gets, which is another incentive to rely on shops. Not every shop has every part, so a large part of the game is spent searching friendly faction towns where you get further discounts. Uranium is used for currency and energy, a neat idea which means you can get a Game Over by spending too much and dying without enough left. As you grow stronger, you unlock one-time objectives (hit foes with the big dumbfire rocket 20 times, kill 20 ships while flying a certain hull, etc) which give you money, and eventually get tasked with claiming core arenas which is where the game does start to feel a little like Descent with interesting rooms and dynamic tactical battles, along with a few less-fun timed mazes and shield-smashing arenas. The setting is a warzone dotted with copy-paste towns, some calm and clean, others violent and broken. Wide roads connect them and the factions fight forever at the intersections. You can gain or lose reputation with any faction: OS, AntiVirus, Malware and Virus. The latter two offer the same data delivery and bounty missions, so if you work for them long enough and switch sides, they ask you to claim parts of the core for them just like the “good guys” do. Lastly for parts of the game I liked, this might be one of the better 6DoF games I've played so far in making fights feel like duels between equals if the levels are right. Also, there's great customization options: You can change how flight feels, how the entire station looks, as well as adjusting game speed, weapon damage or bot intelligence. So what's wrong with this? There's no reason to play. The story has less depth than most free mobile MMOs, with the only dialogue being your ship's audio warnings and some variant of “Nice” when you get a kill streak. An essential in-game Help guide (basically a simple Powerpoint presentation) is your best source for understanding what is going on. You might as well be watching a big fish bowl full of sea monkeys fight until one is crowned the strongest sea monkey. Most of the arenas are pretty bare-bones, but they feel great because everything else is more bare. If there was some way to skip everything except the arenas, this would be a far shorter game where you experiment with weapons and gadgets in deadly encounters and learn how to fight through trial and error. In other words, a classic Descent experience. Here, the unchanging level grind between arenas kills momentum and feels like a waste of time. None of the factions have much personality beyond how chaotic their towns feel, and the big war never stops. Every time you load in, the station is reset as if towns were won and lost while you were away, which feels accurate to a realistic war but again ruins any sense of meaning. There's no plot beyond you trying to escape, which feels like the opposite message a game would want to convey. I also think they failed to make the variety of builds equally viable throughout the game. Unlike other 6DoF games where foes are chunky boxes and attacks move slow enough to dodge, here everything is small and weapons move fast, so taking damage is an expectation. Death is simple and common, especially when you've just moved to a stronger zone, with each respawn requiring a small amount of money. When you don't go into fights with a serious ship, you won't accomplish much. All enemies have recharging shields, so if you don't have enough raw firepower or miss too often or back away to recover, they'll soon be back at full health from whatever damage you deal. This makes for high-focus, frantic combat as you try to aim while moving enough yourself so you aren't an easy target. You need to be aggressive, accurate, patient and tactical, which makes a mid-speed super-tank build the clear winner unless you turn game difficulty down. In summary, if you love gear-score shoot-n-loot combat, this might be your kind of game. Or if you want the niche experience of 6DoF duels with mecha-like customization, you might be perfectly suited for this too. Perhaps you just want 100+ hours of game for a decent price? I enjoyed less than half of the arenas and some of the things my ship could do after 50 hours, but there are better ways to spend that much time. In terms of broad appeal, I wouldn't recommend this game.