Scaling and Review Notes

Personal Hours Played: 2.0

Review Disclaimer

Every game ranked was played, but also scaled based on research, talking to developers & your feedback. The priority with the scale's initial design was to compare similarity on relatively objective features - so it doesn't claim to include reviews of the depth and clarity you'd get at a games journalism site, nor the intensive time played you might get from player reviews on steam. We try to incorporate and link all of that along with a 'review scale' that checks for bugs. See the heatmap and breakdown! Time played noted so you can take any notes with a big grain of salt! I can't get to high level gameplay in 850+ games so I heavily research every game. Over 80 game creators let me interview or survey them! I Hope to go back and refine. Please argue or submit your own scores and reviews to be incorporated with credit into the notes and score numbers.

Added or last checked on 10/27/2023

A spaceship survivors-like that relies heavily on aiming and mixes it up a bit with a giant gunship you call for your upgrades.

Dev reported -1 in level on xp run gain event, which makes sense because you have to call a ship and dock to upgrade, which has its own timer. You can also buy support moves, we'll call it a vendor also I suppose. Partial score in bestiary/lore for having some ship info but not really an enemy guide. There's a dash move, but you might not have it on your build hence the partial score.

Sometimes it gets a little hard to keep track of what's going on and I perhaps wanted it zoomed in a little more, which is a hard trade off with the high speed of the gameplay. At the same time, the clouds of tiny drones to avoid feel fairly unique, partially because not every enemy swarms your ship and some act more like tiny deadly asteroids. Big swarms coming in are very stressful early on and a nice source of XP later, as they should be.

Some of the most tense 'meteor shower' vibes among the space games here, really seems to be so many enemies though they never seem to crowd out the entire screen.

Gameplay is zippy and fun for the most part and while it's obviously not high budget it does thoughtful stuff visually like showing damage structurally to enemy elite ships. I appreciate some builds are silly, like one that just constantly spins your ship in a way that looks nauseating for anyone inside it.

Menus feel very complex in a way that's a bit cumbersome. I wish it was streamlined in some way so I would move through them on the way to starting a mission perhaps? Overall it's a lot of information to keep track of and some stuff is abbreviated where it maybe doesn't need to be. I guess I do appreciate deep stats, but perhaps it doesn't need to be shown all the time.

For example, when upgrading by it shows me all five levels of the upgrade path of what I'm taking. I don't need to see that right away, and it also kind of takes away me having to remember that stuff to make a build. It also shows metadata on there about what kind of attack it is, the cooldown, etc. I think I get why it shows everything, but really just the one sentence could be big in the middle and a button to see more info there and I would have less decision fatigue on upgrade.

Others might prefer being able to see all that info entirely, though, so I hope the dev takes it with a grain of salt if they see this.

Survival mode is technically endless, but enemies don't get stronger after a point. Fleet Assault is 20 rounds.

I don't think adding auto aim for accessibility would make things easier, perhaps it's just a dev challenge since there are so many enemies on screen at once and many player attacks are directional. Overall so much of the gameplay is still about avoiding enemies that it seems auto aim wouldn't remove too much challenge and perhaps could just be overridden by pressing the right stick when needed. In general it feels hard to hit drones in early play and maybe a tiny bit of magic helping the player would feel satisfying.

This one is still in Early Access and under active development so I look forward to seeing where it goes. I think it could carve out a niche as a less goofy space shooter, but I want to see more impactful upgrades, streamlined UI and some other tweaks for it to really compete with the best around in terms of both space twin stick shooters and survivors-likes.