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Review of closed/open beta
chumpai
Member Posts: 10
I've been playing closed (and now open) beta for a few weeks. Currently at level 13 playing on the human side.
In short:
Graphics: 8.5/10 – space is quite pretty, the models are detailed and you certainly don’t feel like you’re running a browser game. Ship interiors are ok, character avatars are nice but npcs look a bit wooden and un-appealing.
PvE: 5/10 – I generally found it grindy and lacked depth.
PvP: 9/10 – Easy to do and had a blast.
Death penalty: 8.5/10 – its a casual game so no losing your ship and rage-quitting like EVE. The penalty is usually more of an annoyance: you get sent to the nearest respawn, hopefully in the same system you died in but potentially all the way back to your home system. You have to repair your ship with resources you’ve collected and your health regenerates from zero.
Depth of gameplay: 6.5/10 – game is mainly about PvP. Map is relatively big for launch but should probably be bigger.
Grouping and communication: 4/10 – my chat system doesn’t work so I can’t talk to other players in game, other players on the forums note that chat will work for a few minutes then die. There is no global chat.
Cash shop: 8/10 – The game makes money by selling cubits (gold) for real money. There’s nothing in game that can’t be bought by playing for long enough but I can see the cash shop working for people who want to drop $20-30 and buy a new ship.
Endgame: 7/10 - kinda hard to judge engame because the endgame starts 5 minutes after you finish the tutorials.
Overall I'd give this game a 7/10.
See next post for a more detailed review.
Comments
what's the combat like? is it at all twitch?
manual or tab targeting?
can you manually dodge/evade fire from enemies?
etc.
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Corpus Callosum
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Initially I was wary as it is a browser basesd game but I have to say it certainly doesn't feel like it. Currently you chose a side (Colonial or Cylon) you start with a quick tutorial mission and then you're thrown into the game. You can go see Admiral Adama/Cavil for another 3 tutorial missions (which give you some of the backstory) or you can see Lee Adama/Leoben for your 'daily' I.e. grind missions. You can go visit the Hangar Chief/Valeri for new equipment or upgrades.
The npcs will tell you that the situation of the fleet is dire, ships are damaged and FTL drives aren't working properly and you have to go out and kill the enemy and collect resources.
Basically they ask you to get:
Cubits (gold): taken from enemy npcs and pcs when you kill them – used to buy weapons, ammo and upgrades.
Tylium: Fuel used for boosting FTL jumps (all ships have FTL including vipers which have a jury rigged system). Also, you can get tylium when you trade in salvage. Tylium is a secondary currency in the game, some higher level ships can be bought with tylium as well as all the basic ammo and modules.
Water: The fleet is short on water and you are asked to mine it from asteroids. Apart from that water can be traded for tylium.
Titanium: Also mined from asteroids and used to repair your ship (items get damaged when you get shot etc). Can also be traded for tylium.
PvE - This includes mining asteroids, killing enemy npcs, drones (3rd unplayable faction) and weapons platforms. Also, includes salvaging wrecks for components. The experience is farily grindy, but it can be incorporated into your daily missions.
Daily missions include a requirement that you mine x amount of tylium and water, kill y amount of drones, weapons platforms, enemy npcs and other players. There are also requirements to do mineral analyses – usually in hostile systems.
In this game PvE is more or less done to get resources to level up and do PvP. You will want to kill npcs to get loot (effectively cubits and tylium) which can be use to upgrade your gear (each item you get can be upgraded with tylium and cubits level 10 – In a nutshell level 10 doubles the effectiveness of your modules). Doing enough PvE in a particular system will result in the fleet sending an outpost which will give you a respawn point in that system and a place to change your gear.
Finally there is a grind for XP which is quite important. Doing pretty much anything gives you an XP bonus – though the biggest rewards are for PvP. You can spend all the XP into various skills such as electronic warfare, missile/cannon accuracy, ability cooldowns and extra HP. The XP system is a hybrid system where you invest points to buy a skill upgrade but it takes real time to train that ability.
When you get enough resources you can head over to an abandoned base and requisition a new ship. You start with a strike figher either viper/raider or raptor/heavy raider from the Re-imagined TV series. Strikes are designed to hit big line ships (kind of like battleships or ‘baby battlestars’), Line ships are designed to hit other line ships and escorts, escorts are designed to kill strikes. Your basic rock-paper-scissors scenario. To add variety each class 3 subclasses. For example, Colonial Strike ships include the Viper (an interceptor), Raptor (electronic warfare) and a Rhino (bomber). That said, a single strike craft with 500 HP will struggle destroy a line ships with 3500 HP by themselves. Its a game of teamwork which brings me to...
PvP – I quite enjoy the pvp in this game. Its the kind of game where a skilled level 6 player can skill a level 12 player if they get the jump on them. Similarly to games like EVE online your loadout when you undock can greatly influence the outcome, however, battles are determined by the heat of the moment decisions – Out-run or out-manoeuvre? Hit and run or tank it out? Use flares against missiles or shoot them down?
That said, this is a game for grouping. Its nigh on impossible to take down an experienced player in a line ship unless you have 5-6 well co-ordinated strike pilots outfitted in line-killing gear. Having multiple players gives you an advantage in that you can specialise. One player can go all cannons and shoot down missiles, others can go short range launchers and do devastating damage in bombing runs, others can use electronic warfare to upload viruses and disable disable enemy abilities.
For anyone interested, I’d certainly encourage you try it out. In all honesty though I don’t see it becoming anything more than a game like counter-strike where I log on for a few hours and have bash the keyboard a bit but I don’t connect emotionally the way you might connect to your companion npcs in games like Mass Effect or your fellow capsuleers in EVE. Its good to play but I can see a lot of people getting bored and lured away by the next shiny game that comes along. Still there is a lot of room for improvement and hopefully this game will expand and attract a dedicated playerbase.
Its twitch. You can play with the mouse or use wasd keys to move. I've heard people have had trouble using a joystick. You manually select targets but you can use hotkeys (E.g. 'z' to target incoming missiles). Cannons will autofire as soon as you're in range and within the firing arc. Missiles are manually activated and require a bit more finess - they also have a minimum range which can make things interesting if you're hot on someone's tail.
In terms of evading fire you have to move out of the way of their cannons, missiles you have a number of options - shoot them down, out run them, use decoys or zig-zag until the missile runs out of juice.
Hope that answers your question.
It's more of a psuedo twitch. Unfortunately controls aren't very good. Combat is pretty basic. Guns auto fire and you point towards target by trying to r click on them all the time(wasd is very unresponsive at best)
auto target to, x for enemy lock
dodging is sort of there but not very good
Ultimately think of everything you get in a space shooter and cut it all in half for a browser game.
It's free and in open beta with no download so what's stopping you try for yourself?
The "no download" part is not exactly true. You do have to download and install the "Unity Engine" but tha is relatively small and you do have to have 1 GB free drive space reserved for Unity temp game files.
Let's party like it is 1863!
I just tried it out. Played for about 2 hours and had a relatively fun time. I couldn't imagine sitting down for hours playing this, but it does seem like it would be fun when played on a casual time frame.
Graphics look fine to me. Not anything to to have a nerdgasm over, but for a browser game they're not too shabby.
Gameplay is okay. Again, nothing overly amazing, but I found it fun. Missions I can see being repetative, but I think playing a little at a time will stop burn-out. The combat is simple, but I find it fun none the less. You have to keep in firing range and line up your "firing arcs" yourself, but the weapons auto fire.
I'm not sure what everyone else was talking about when they said the couldn't chat, but if it wasn't working before, it is now.
Overall, for what the game is, I'll give it a 7/10. For a Sci-Fi Browser game, it's fairly decent.
EDIT: Just wanted to add, I really liked the music. There were some parts that had this sort of somber, military-esque tune that was heavy on snare and a bit of bass thrown in and I thought it sounded pretty neat.
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