Again, if control of your crew members is made difficult by design then it's a horrible, horrible choice. All it achieves is frustration of players. In modern video games it is crucial to present a fair challenge to the player, not one that is a product of insufficient polish to the game systems. If you want to remove pause completely from the game then more power to you - but it needs to be consistent. Remove pausing when a room is selected and remove unit pausing when a member is selected. Give me a precise way to select and handle my units. Then I won't need pause. Your second point is something that I disagree with vehemently. There is no achievement in waiting for your ship to be repaired after a fight - all it creates is tedium. I thought we, as in gamers/developers are already past the times when it was thought to be a good idea to punish the player by wasting his time on purpose. Winning a difficult and challenging space battle is an achievement in itself, having to deal with a superficial downtime especially in a single player game, is nothing short of stupid. This is lazy game design at it's best.
Just started to dip my toes into the game. Love it so far! The only problem was I didn't finish the tutorial so my progress didn't save and I need to restart (or I didn't see a save button) the tutorial when I have time to finish it.
I'm also a lurker haha. I don't post very often but here goes... I definitely agree here. I just completed the game. My exact game time was 3hrs 25mins. There are tons of locations that you cannot visit, however I'm sure these will slowly open up in the future. It did give me a disappointing feeling as I played through. However I personally did enjoy the mini games, it just made it feel so much better to complete each battle. I do recommend if you want less micro managing, get the machine gun and laser cannon. If you get the plasma torpedo, you have more micro managing to do. Replay previous missions and be sure to have everything upgraded to full before you get to the end. I also disagree with someone stating there are no bugs. There are bugs. I'm using an ipad 4, up to date iOS. Somewhere near the end, the frame rate dropped horribly. I'm not sure why this happened, but I just reset my ipad just in case. The frame rate was better, but it still chugged. Also this can happen, as the TA review stated, I killed the enemy ship with enemies still on board. I proceeded to kill them all. Then I realized there was one left, stuck on the bridge. I could not get to it because there was a hull breach blocking the way. Then you'll say "repair the hull breach!" However you can't repair a hull breach until the battle is over from my experience. My shields would not charge to full in this situation. Thus I had to restart my mission. I also experienced 2 crashes during my play through. I don't consider that so bad, but it can happen. I do want to point out that when you finish the game (which gets ridiculously hard near the end), you start over, like a new game +. You get a medium sized ship and 3 designs to choose from (there is no explanation so I can guess there are no benefits of one ship vs. another) with different color choices. I started my second play through. You get new rooms, a sentry room that apparently makes robots, an armory that arms your soldiers with grenades, and a medical bay that resurrects those killed in battle(not hull breaches). I think that is sort of an incentive to play again, but it's on a harder difficulty... I guess we should expect the hardest difficulty will have bigger ships and new rooms. If I survive I'll try to confirm this. Personally I enjoyed the game, despite the crazy difficulty at the end. I do wish there could have been more and there were a lot of poor design choices. For example coming soon buttons, which could have easily just been left out, and a lot of grayed out locations on the map. I still recommend this at it's current price at 2.99. Even though $5 (the later price) is not a lot, I still can't see myself paying that after what I know now from my play through.
I'd like to see your proposals for turning QWOP and Nethack into "fair games". Fairness is overrated anyway, the balance should always be against the player. Challenge is all but dead these days.
This is straw man argument. The whole point of QWOP is to make it difficult to control. Actually that is the whole game. That does not make it a good game. Surgeon Simulator 2013 is in the same bucket - fun experiment with comic controls. Is Star Command a game about quirky controls? As for the rest of your post I will simply agree to disagree, we have drastically different views on game design and let's leave it at that.
The reviews in this thread and the comments in the review thread have completely turned me off of this title. I was looking forward to checking it out and intentionally avoided most gameplay videos in order to build some suspense and keep my brain spoiler-free, and it looks like it will remain just that. Too bad, as hype is hard to ignore and my excitement for this managed to escalate rather quickly this week. I guess, in retrospect, I'm glad I was too preoccupied last night to pick this up. I'll keep this on my watch list and see if updates help it along, but from what I'm reading today, this title really missed the mark. So it goes.
It would be pretty easy to keep everyone happy by putting in a quick repair option after a battle that spreads xp evenly among engineers or let the player micromanage it giving the repair jobs to the crew they want. Can see the points from both sides, its just player preference.
It's not just lazy game design. Making the interface (especially for firing weapons) so obtuse artificially lengthens a short game by making the player spend time working out how to play the game instead of actually playing the game.
Too many mixed impressions about this game. Even the reviews are very mixed. I'll wishlist this game and wait for a sale or updates.
This. I've watched the whole protracted birth of this game from afar, but the detractors all seem to be saying similar things and they all sound entirely plausible. I find too many games on iOS have bad controls, and this sounds bad even by iOS standards. Releasing a game unfinished in order to add content down the line is one thing (see: Repulze) but releasing a game unfinished because you can't get the core mechanics to work properly is another.
I'm getting 2/3 or 3/3 most times on the laser...helpful to use both thumbs...watch for which dot is moving fastest, and mash that with one finger, then with the other finger do the middle speed dot and the final, slower dot. All three taps happen quickly, though, within a half second or less.
No, but are the controls quirky? They work perfectly well for me. What was being proposed is a whole set of new controls and mechanics designed to make the game simpler and more automated. There's no fixing to be done, only dumbing down.
Making the crew a bit smarter won't dumb down anything. They are plainly stupid. Thank god for the fire not spreading like FTL, otherwise it would be stupid like The Sims...
The game is far too short, like few missions - say 10 or 15. Many planets are not even used, let's hope for future updates.
It means nothing. QWOP is a free flash game that's being played because it's ridiculous. I am not sure if it's terribly flattering for SC to compare it with QWOP. There is always a certain degree of automation in games that include heavy micromanagement - RTS, ARTS and others in this spirit. Move-attack orders, automatic gathering, control groups, patrol orders, behavior stances and more. Pray tell me - does this mean these games are dumbed down?
Therefore it follows that one way to be a good game is to be ridiculous. You seem to have an extremely narrow view of what makes a game "good".
- LONGTIME Lurker of this game/thread on Toucharcade - Huge Star Trek Fan - Did NOT Kickstart this With that being said here are my honest thoughts: Having followed this game since its inception, they basically were shooting for Game Dev Story meets a "Star Trek" like adventure. Do they succeed at that? A very positive "YES". Remember Game Dev story was very repetitive/addictive, this game takes that formula and adds upon it. I see some of the complaints about how they didn't keep their commitments from the Kickstarter, or "They said this, and it doesn't have it now" I'm not really going to comment on any of that, because what I originally imagined the game would be it is and succeeds and excels at. Could it use a little more? Sure but most every game could, especially in the world of indie game development. I'm an old school gamer, I didn't grow up in the world of hour long tutorials, I was the kid that played the NES versions of Ninja Gaiden WITHOUT a game genie. So as frustrating the weapons system may be at time, part of the fun for me was failing and then finally figuring it out and succeeding. I see people complaining about their crew dying too easily, that's part of the challenge! Name the crew uniquely, keep them alive! Level them up through combat, use their special techniques! If one of my valued crew members died because of me ignoring them during a battle, I would reload the mission and play again and try to keep them all alive. It was fun, maybe people disagree but I liked that. Having finished my first run through of the main story and onto my second ship I am very excited to play through the game again, use some of the new rooms (armory room, sentry/turret) upgrade them and begin the adventure again, wait for it, just like Game Dev Story! Learn from your mistakes, and play through the campaign again, but unlike GDS I get more options on the second play though. (3 new ship designs, more crew, more to micromanage) In closing I don't think I had a huge chip on my shoulder going into this game which I sensed some people did. (And possibly rightfully so had they made the choice to Kickstart) But as a guy who waited and plucked down a few dollars to play this game it was DEFINITELY worth the purchase. I would have happily payed 5 bucks for this, and look forward to the add-ons. Oh and one final note to Warballoon, thanks for the game, it has more than lived up to my expectations but in your continued work in game development (Which I hope you all do) maybe invest in a mouthpiece/PR rep to handle announcements to the community, probably save you all some headaches.
