So I tried Infinite Space, and oh boy. How can anyone play this? The Story seems to be sewn together from the desiccated corpses of every sci-fi anime ever, the menu structure is extremely aggravating -tons of different screens and tons and tons of "are you sure you want to leave this screen" - and, oh let me get back to the story, the main character is so much of a cardboard cutout I want to find a way to get him killed and replace him. Combat seems to come down to a gamble, apart from having better ships, and consists of repeated (and fortunately skippable) cut scenes with horrible audio. Also, so far it's not a space game IMO - it could just as well have been sailing ships and islands instead of spaceships and planets.
I'm trying out Approaching Infinity next. Here's to hope.
AI definitely aint for everyone. Biggest problem: The tutorial does NOT tell you enough. There's *alot* of stuff to the game overall. Like, a ton. The tutorial will tell you only the absolute basics, and even then, it'll not explain them fully.
I, so far, am quite enjoying it. Some things in it are very typical of roguelikes... extremely simplistic combat (does ANY roguelike ever not have that aspect?), for instance, you've got a ranged weapon and a melee weapon when on planets, and so far for me at least just a missile.... thing, for space combat; apparently more can be gotten there (as in, more than one weapon equipped on the ship at once), but I've not figured that out yet. Unlike many roguelikes though, particularly on planets or in stations or whatever, each enemy type is actually DIFFERENT and does different things. This part, I like, as alot of roguelikes dont actually do this.
And none of that Nethack sort of thing where you get an unidentified thing, the only way to figure it out is to use it, so you use it and instantly die. Yeah. None of that here. That's good, because I haaaaaaaaaaaate that.
Exploring planets and other things that require an away team can be tough because of the blasted oxygen. That system can be pretty annoying, but I can understand why it's there, so I dont mind it too much. And you'll do MUCH more combat on planets than in space. Away team death does not = captain death (usually) so that's not instant game over, but ship destruction is.
I dont entirely understand the crafting yet, and I DEFINITELY dont understand the "lab" thing, that's.... confusing. Interesting, but confusing.
Interface is a little strange, but functional. There's like 50 thousand buttons in the top right of the interface that do stuff I dont remember.
Dont expect anything from the graphics. Typical roguelike: They are very function-over-form. They look fine to me (alot better than most tilesets), but then I tend to think ASCII looks nice, so my opinion on that probably doesnt mean much. The dude that represents your team on away missions though looks alarmingly stupid.
But yeah, after a couple of hours, I'm thoroughly enjoying it so far, and there's alot to it, yet I've barely scratched the surface of it. So far I'm thinking that for me at least it was a worthy purchase. Love games like this, but I have trouble finding ones I consider genuinely good and deep enough to keep my attention.
Also: this one looks to prove to be a LONG game. If you turn perma-death on, well.... yeah. That one's gonna HURT if you go down far into it, as this isnt one of those roguelikes where a run takes like 15 minutes. It's more like Dungeons of Dredmor.... that game, it can take 15 *hours* when the dungeon size is at it's default and the difficulty is medium or high. And it suuuuuuuucks to die on like, the last floor in that game. I'm expecting this one will prove to be very, very similar in that regard.
EDIT: Or it turns out the game doesnt HAVE an ending unless you specifically choose to do one of the end quests, which are apparantly lengthy and complicated. There's no end to the number of sectors and things that you can explore and do whatever you want in.
EDIT: Okay, so I found a dungeon thing, has very good things in it but the captain has to come along with the away team (he dies, it's game over), did mostly fine, chopped through many of the normal baddies without trouble, ran back to ship for healing when needed, was nearing the end of the area... boss appears. No way I can kill it, so, run back to the ship.... and I die *on* the exit tile, the moment I reach it. Just. What. Now THAT is an irritating way to go down. ONE more turn and.... uuuuuugh.
