This looks awesome - I adore the pixel graphics. And the atmosphere is excellent. Like others, I'm having a really hard time with the combat and have little idea how it works. All seems really slow to me. They're taking so long to reach the outcome of me having my ass handed to me (only really on the second main ship battle). Seems I'll need to read that guide posted a page or so back.
I don't really feel like a strategy game. TBH, I don't know what kind of genre this game could be classified. If you want to call what I described as "strategy", fine, but at least you should have a better way to do your strategy, the crew is dumb as The Sims, and you don't have that much time to manage them because you are invaded way too often, FTL is better in this aspect (and every other...)
I see your point, but the things you're saying kinda sound intentional. The crew aren't very smart because it's your job to look after them (as with The Sims), you're the puppeteer in the whole charade. God, if you like. Not having time to manage everything is the entire concept behind time management in games. If you had time to do everything, what's left? No chaos, no deaths, no hull breaches sucking people into space...
It's a very good game, but it really needs more stuff for a longtime motivation. Hopefully we'll see gamecenter archievments and some sort of sandbox mode in the future. Already finished the game and i would start it again if there would be some random campaign like ftl.
See this is what's putting me off. The game's been out less than 24 hours and people are already finished with it, with no seeming incentive to play again
I won't uninstall it, some missions and dialogues are really funny, probably will replay couple of them on longer trips or rainy days.Also eagerly waiting for updates, I want to know what contrabands in game are for and under coming soon - dog and pirate look awesome.
Here are my suggestions on how to improve the general usability of the game: 1. If I send an Engineer to a room, he should continue repairing/extinguishing the whole room, not just the few tiles around him. 2. Engineers shouldn't attempt to extinguish a fire while standing in it, even if I clicked directly on that tile. 3. All repairs necessary should be applied automatically and instantly after the player wins a combat. 4. Tokens should generate themselves automatically when below the allowed threshold. 5. Tokens should be refilled automatically and instantly after the player wins a combat. 6. Selecting a crew member should pause the game, just as it happens right now when selecting a room. 7. Some fire/breach screen edge indicators would be nice to quickly find where the damage has been done. 8. Active icons that require a token to be used (shield recharge, dodge, etc.) should display a small number on/above them indicating the number of tokens left. 9. I should be allowed to cycle through the upgrades/rooms while reading thir description. Right now you have to toggle the description off, cycle forward and turn it back on - tedious. 10. Redshirts should be able to fire when moving. 11. Consider making unit selection more precise or providing an alternative option of selecting them. A small, color coded, scrolling list docked in the lower right corner of the screen could do the trick. Here's a very, very rough sketch of the idea threw together in Photoshop (click for a full size): This would let us select units quickly and also give a plethora of other useful things - quick preview of unit's status (idle, working, under attack, etc.). 12. Add an option to select all crew members of a particular class and move them in groups. 13. Allow for a 'tap-attack' order. If I have a redshirt selected and I tap on an enemy, he/she should keep following the target while shooting.
I actually saw this for the first time the day before it was released, because I've only been hanging around the toucharcade app for a few months so I've missed all the hype on this. I downloaded it after seeing a preview video the day before it was released and downloaded it on that basis. It's a solid game, don't get me wrong. It's great fun and you will enjoy playing it. There are a few kinks (such as hull breaches making the game much easier and your ship being able to get shot by the enemy an unlimited number of times without a game over) but these are easily fixable and will probably be sorted in future updates. Plus, you can play without abusing them should you choose. The game is charming and the mechanics are fairly decent. It won't take you long to complete if you stick at it and there's not much to do when you're done except play through with a bigger ship. It reminds me of Fester Mudd in that respect - played it all the way through in one sitting and enjoyed it but once you're done, you're done until there's a new release. In Fester's case, I'll be playing part II, in Star Command's case it'll be that there is (hopefully) a much expanded upon gameplay element. As it is, it's worth dropping a few bucks on to keep yourself entertained for a few hours because it's a good experience.
-Long wait times Actually, if you're playing this efficiently, the wait times shouldn't be a problem. After a battle you'll have injured crew members, a ton of fires, hull breaches and no tokens left. You'll want to put people to generate tokens in your token rooms, send engineers out to fix fires and breaches (or at least non-strategic breaches) and you'll want to send healers to your fighters (or vice versa if your healer is tied up generating tokens). You'll be so busy fixing up your ship, the token charges will be done at around about the same time, but a fast forward button would be nice. As for in battle, the token charging times are NOT broken, they're about right. They're just slow enough that you can avoid most hits, but occasionally you're going to have to pick and choose whether to take a hit and that could mean having to evacuate an area that's about to be hit. The crew being identical isn't an issue. They just randomly generate characters. It would maybe be nice to have them start with better stats, but I hardly ever used their levels or abilities at all. I certainly wouldn't drop an extra token for a level 10 character. Learning the minigames isn't hard, it took a few tries sure but hey, it's not that bad. Once you get good you'll hit almost every time but still make mistakes, it puts you under pressure and I like that it's not just "press a button to shoot the guns". Yes, it is all ship battles, but that was one of my main points. They evidently spent a lot of time developing the combat and the result is that's the main part of the game. Would it be cool if they added other stuff? Yes, and they might add more stuff in future. If that's what you want, wait until the future. But as it is, this is a spaceship battle game and thats what you're buying. Your complaint is akin to complaining that in angry birds, all you do is throw birds. And it's not buggy, the only bugs in this game are the ants. There are no game-breaking bugs, there are ways to abuse the AI and the mechanics (pretty sure there are in every game, AI will never be perfect), but there are no "bugs". As for incomplete, they're advertising a feature that will be coming soon, there's nothing wrong with that, it's nice to know that they're going to be adding more to the game.
Most of what you listed is geared towards making the game easier. I do like #11 though. The game's difficulty has a lot to do with having to be constantly aware of what your crew is doing. Making the game "set and forget" trivializes the difficulty.
A game design that builds up difficulty by tedium, unresponsive controls and bad interface is a very poor one. Challenge can be presented by other means than placing artificial hurdles along the way. It's similar to the 3D platform games of old where a botched camera would make some jumps almost impossible. Would you too argue that making the camera work properly would make the game too easy?
This is almost correct. The laser gets easier when you practice, but the machine gun does a lot of damage but is much slower. Don't worry about losing one or two crew members, you get 4 tokens per battle usually so it's not a big deal. But you may want to reset if you lose too many The dodge room is very useful, as is a shield repair room. You do NOT need a medical room. The shield repair room will require one medic character in there to make tokens and generate the shield repair. If you have your other medic with your shooters, they can usually take down most waves without a problem, but if they get overwhelmed, two healers can and will heal your crew as fast as a healing room. I put all my shooters in the shield room with my two healers while being chased by two boarding parties of fire ants and my healers could heal my soldiers faster than the enemies could damage them. Healing room is a waste of resources if that's the case, so I'd stick with a shield recharge room. For the record, a shield recharge recharges about 75% of your shield bar so you should wait until you get hit twice to use it and get your shields up. It is also possible to repair breaches in battle providing your shields are up (by your shields being up, that means that the bar a the bottom has no red in it, when you take a hit you lose around 70% of the bar and the bar then recharges up another 10% to 40%. Your shields are up once the bar is recharged that 10%). If you take a hit while repairing a breach, the breach will open again unless your shields are completely full, so you might want a dodge charged up while they fix a breach you don't want.
Pixel art Does anyone don't feel the art is not that good ? All the pixel art is so great, but the "not so hd and not so good art" screens like planet or ships interiors are all spoiling the great job. Mixing pixel arts and regular one that is not professionnal level is too bad for the look and feel of this game.
Actually, I disagree with this. The game design does achieve what it aims to do. The whole point of combat is to feel frantic and overwhelming. If they game pauses during unit selection, you lose that. Also, like I said above, the auto refill would defeat the point of fixing your ship after battle. After your ship gets trashed, you have to spend time fixing it up. If it auto fixes, it kinda defeats the point of showing you how hard the battle was, it lessens the achievement. I agree about a unit selection bar, but I think the other points infringe on the combat system. It's not perfect, but it does what it aims to do well, and it is fun. It's the right level of challenging, and I'm glad a lot of you are losing a lot of battles, because it makes a nice change from most games when winning is handed to you on a plate.
I would have preferred the artwork to be at full iPad resolution, but it's close enough and the pixel visuals are really what take center stage so I don't notice too much.
^ This I have about 3 hours in the game and haven't experienced any significant control issues. The frantic pace of a heated battle makes the tedium of clicking and directing each crew member in real time part of the difficulty. I like it. If it were much easier to select and direct the crew then you'd lose that "oh shit" factor. The repairs and tokens after a battle go hand in hand I think. Making the repairs, even after battles, gives the crew XP. While repairing, crank out tokens. After losing 5 of my 9 crew members, losing 3 of my 5 rooms, and having nearly my entire ship on fire, PLUS having to mop up 10 antorians on my ship ... The time spent making the repairs felt like victory!
