"The Battle of Sol" is a spaceship game with no open world or RPG features - it´s a sequence of missions where you must do what you´re told with the gear you´ve been given.
Right off the bat I liked how the devs tried to input personality into the characters, especially with humor in the dialogues - I have heard pretty dull dialogues in other games lately.
I loved the fighter takeoff, it really gives you a sense of speed.
I also liked the sound effects of the engine and of the lasers. The cockpit instruments and indicators are great, also. I like the overall graphics, I don´t know why other reviews disliked or "meh" them.
But the ship controls are so different from what I am currently playing that I will have to finish my current, ongoing space sims before hopping into this one, so that I don´t get confused. Good thing is that you can remap the key bindings, which I will do eventually. I like to match ship controls throughout all the games as much as I can.
There is a feature called "slide", where you essencially turn off the engine and drift in space. I think this is the substitute for the strafe, which is non-existent - actually, you don´t use WASD to pilot, which is very very weird.
So "slide" is mouse right-button, while "missile" is F. Looks like this slide thing is important. And "enemy target" is 2. Why? Because R, T and G are used as a means of allocating energy to after-burners, weapons or hull integrity. This is a big deal, too. The energy gets depleted quite fast, so you have to manage the allocation in-battle.
I don´t think I´ll remap the keys after all...
And I got to play for the other side, too! At least once, as far as I know. The enemy - a kind of Oriental/Middle-East/religious people in red-lighted ships - can hack systems; you have to memorize a series of letters that appear and then input them to hack. I imagine that doing this mid-battle will be hard.
Anyway, it is different, it is promising. Five missions in, I like it so far.
UPDATE: ten missions in, + or -. You keep switching between two different ships, with two different characteristics, so you never have time to get really good in neither of them.
And now I´m at a mission where I have to:
1) scan and destroy like a dozen of APD (stationary radar transmitters or something like it);
2) fight an old foe, who´s in a huge gunship;
3) fight off several waves of fighters pestering you.
Detail: the gunship has, like, fifteen turrets, and you can only do damage to the gunship if you destroy each turret, and you can only destroy a turret if it´s locked on your targeting system, even if you´re face to face to it, super-close; (and when you try yo lock on one turret, all turrets stay highlighted at the same time, so it´s super hard to know which one you locked on, and even if it´s on the side facing you or the other side) and the gunship keeps moving frantically, so you´r always facing the rear engines of it and, since THERE´S NO STRAFE in the game, it´s almost impossible to circumvent the ship and position yourself better.
Detail 2: the fighters pestering you appear out of nowhere, always behind you, and:
a) they have missiles;
b) you don´t have any missile, ever.
So it´s super hard to the level of unfairness.
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I´m still marking it as "recommend" because I´ll give it another try later, maybe tomorrow, but I´m almost rage quitting it.
So I´m about to change the position of my thumb.
And don´t "git gud" me. Games are supposed to be fun, not annoying, not irritating. I´ve been performing well in this game. I´ve already completed 19 games this year. I simply don´t want to play the same level over and over again just because the game was designed for children who can spend a whole afternoon playing one level. This game is not even that engaging.
chances are the only memory I´ll have of this game is this moment where I´m mad when I was supposed to be happy.
UPDATE 2 AND FINAL:
Just as I found the strategy to beat the big gunship, the game started cheating by means of bugs.
Bug 1 - the ship disappeared when its hull was at 50% and never returned. I spent more than half an hour going to and fro, to no avail.I had to start all over.
Bug 2- this happened four times: every time I was about to destroy the ship, a message of "warning: you are leaving the mission area" appeared and in some of the times, I was very near the NPC ship, so the ship can leave the mission area while I cannot? Anyway, no matter which direction I went to avoid this, I ended up being destroyed, losing the mission.
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Sorry, I cannot recommend a game that prevents you to progress by being impossible to play.
