Avorion

Overall, I have to leave a thumbs down for Avorion but it isn't an easy one mind you. The game is genuinely good fun and interesting throughout a good portion of the game. Pretty much everything before entering the barrier to the center was a well-paced, interesting experience with a steady buildup of challenge and adventure. If I were to judge the game purely by this segment of the game alone, I would absolutely give in a positive review. Once you pass the center barrier, however, that's when things take a nosedive. The challenge spikes significantly with enemies that outclass you to an extreme degree. This alone wouldn't be an issue but it basically forces you into a situation where it are spending a SIGNIFICANT amount of time grinding. And to be completely honest, the endgame grind of Avorion is just not very appealing. There is a type of player that can likely enjoy getting lost in the esoterica of micromanaging stations, trade routes, and material acquisition to the level required to do well in endgame, but I'm just not that player, and I feel that most players won't be either. This is amplified by the fact that there isn't a terribly high amount of skill expression in combat either. More health and better weapons pretty much exclusively wins fights which means that the endgame is push even more towards grinding for your ship to be bigger and piece-mealing random weapons with bigger DPS numbers on. Overall, the early to midgame is very solid and a fun and enjoyable experience, but I don't think there is much for players to look forwards to in the late to endgame unless they are prepared to spend many hours grinding and many hours waiting.

This has earned a coveted place on my "scratches the Freelancer itch" shelf of my library. It is often difficult to describe what that means, or why I spend so much time looking for it. On the surface, it is not an overly deep or complicated game, it does not appear to have particularly high production value (no voice actors, minimal texturing, little lore/flavor/story, no flare art, and most of the content is procedurally generated. There is also not much for mission diversity or distinguishing feel to different sectors/areas. That does not sound like a glowing endorsement, but somehow it really all works together. Under the relatively unpolished surface, sits a surprisingly robust framework for turning a player loose to shape their own personal galaxy in whichever way they desire. The MAJOR selling point of Avorion is experience flexibility. It goes leaps and bounds beyond the traditional "Economy / Diplomacy / Combat" win conditions, and lets the player really branch out to approach the few defined goals however they want. The player gets the usual Mine/Salvage/Trade/Fight options for obtaining materials and currency, and the usual goal of "Get better ship, explore more dangerous area." Unusually, though, the player is then offered the option of buying some random seed generated ships, building their own ships from the absolute lowest granular block level (with few guardrails), or connecting directly to the Steam Workshop to peruse plans for ships that other players have built and uploaded. The player also gets to decide between building a giant hero ship and taking on the galaxy solo, building a combat formation comprised of different specialist ships working in tandem (from little fighters up to hulking dreadnoughts), or an armada of multiple formations staffed with NPC captains and sent off to do his or her bidding in distant areas of the galaxy while the player works on something else. Further along in the game, the player can also build their own space stations to manufacture/trade with other denizens of the galaxy. While there are multiple approaches to end-game, the primary focus is space combat, and there are a satisfying variety of weapons and equipment classes/levels/rarities to appease the RPG/dungeon crawler crowd, acquired generously through trade stations and combat loot. Ship variety/class is a complete non-issue, as the player is granted unrestricted access to build nearly any size/shape/objective ship from the ground up at any time (more/better components are unlocked as the game progresses, but there are very few guardrails). The real party piece with Avorion, though, is command/control. The game starts off similar to a 3rd person shooter, with the ship as the player character. The usual control inputs apply, allowing "fly where you look" style, or "fly with keyboard and shoot where mouse looks" style, and the game can be completed entirely in that mode. If the player decides to run a fleet instead of one ship, he or she can use keyboard shortcuts or mouse selection to issue orders to escorting ships in their area. Where things diverge from the standard, though, is that the player is also free to switch to a top-down view of their sector at any time (think map view), and gain the ability to select any/all of their ships in the area like units in an RTS, and assign them move/attack orders anywhere else in the sector. It's a bit like playing Freelancer with wingmates one minute, and then with the push of a button playing the same engagement as StarCraft. And it's not just a gimmick, either; one can rapidly switch back and forth, using RTS mode to coordinate flanking maneuvers, and then hopping down into direct control of any particular ship in "real space" for fine tuning positioning or targeting. At the end of the day, there isn't a whole lot of curated/directed content, but there is an extremely flexible framework that one can use to play Space Legos with. There is also a reasonably active modding community to spice things up with, once you have played through the vanilla experience. Very good value in hours-of-fun per dollar invested.

Avorion - An Overhyped Space Mess with Missed Potential I really wanted to like Avorion. The premise sounded amazing: an expansive, dynamic space sandbox where I could design my own ships, blast through enemies with tons of turrets, and maybe even build a vast space empire. The freedom of ship design is a huge hook, and the chaos of firing a thousand bullets at once is undeniably satisfying. But after putting in far too many hours, it's clear: Avorion is a game that has no idea what it wants to be, and it's maddening to watch it squander its potential. Let's talk about the major issue here: the developers. They clearly have no direction. The game constantly feels like it's in an identity crisis. Are they making an open-world, action-oriented single-ship space game? Or are they aiming for a more complex, X4 style space empire simulator? The answer is neither, and unfortunately, the game is trying to do both while failing at both. Automation—one of the key aspects I was really excited for is frustratingly broken. Your ships will not defend themselves unless you set them to a specific combat mission. That's the only way they'll engage enemies. Which, by the way, means they can’t do anything else if they're in “attack mode.” So much for having automated fleets of ships helping you out while you focus on other things. If you're thinking that maybe you can automate some production or factory work to make your empire run smoothly, think again. The game doesn't even let you control factory inputs, meaning your stations will get choked up with a single resource and grind to a halt. Want to send a freighter off to sell some materials manually and clear up space for production? Too bad. Docking bugs make that impossible. It’s just downright broken. I had issues that had been reported for years, and when I looked into it, the devs have essentially shrugged and admitted they're not fixing them. It’s like they’ve given up on ironing out the kinks while they’ve been focusing on adding more features that don’t really solve anything. I gave Avorion the best shot I could. There’s so much here that could be great if only the devs would pick a direction and stick with it. Right now, it feels like you’re playing a half-baked idea that can’t make up its mind between a solo action experience or an empire-building simulation. Until they decide, this is a game that will remain a frustrating, buggy mess. Avorion isn't bad because it’s unfinished; it’s bad because the developers are trying to do too much at once and not succeeding in any meaningful way. Until they fix the broken systems and actually commit to one vision, I can't recommend it.

Avorion is the game I wished No Man's Sky to be. I am a big fan of sandbox games, automation games, survival, crafting, and continuous progression games. Avorion offers you the perfect mix of all these types of games. It is a large sandbox with great systems working on top of it. I like the story mode (skipable) of working your way up from nothing. The various difficulties offer the right degree of challenge for everyone. In a way, it is comparable with Mount & Blade. The journey from nobody to fleet commander is the enjoyable and replayable part of this game. Have I mentioned the complete freedom you are given in the ship editor? Mining resources to build your perfect spaceship feels so rewarding - and every battle feels engaging as you might lose all the precious goods you just acquired. No save game reload (apart from copying the whole galaxy folder) is possible. I have played for about 100 hours now and I have engaged with many of the systems but I have yet to reach the endgame. I have not touched on the major addition to that: Multiplayer & Workshop This will certainly increase the replayability by a ton. What needs to be improved? Sometimes travel feels slow (due to loading between each tile on the map). But you can work your way around that with a larger ship, system slots or hyperspace cores. The game could also benefit from some quest variety - even if they are generic. The simple fetch quests for example could certainly benefit to make the early game more engaging. The price point of this game is fair. You can argue about the DLCs but I think the complete package is worth the money.

🚫 Negative Review for Avorion (2.5+) Avorion sells itself as a sandbox of freedom: build ships, run an economy, command carriers with fighter swarms. In reality, much of that “freedom” is cut away by the game’s own design. ❌ 1. Savegame trap If you don’t tick “Enable Mods” when creating a galaxy, that save is locked forever. Mods will never work there. You can spend dozens of hours reaching Xanion, only to realize the economy is broken, UI is barebones, fighters are limited… and the only fix is starting over from scratch. Devs justify this as “save corruption prevention.” For the player, it just means wasted time. ❌ 2. Fighters gutted Older versions let you design fighters from turrets. That’s gone. Now you can only use pre-made blueprints: buy from NPCs, loot them, or copy captured ones. The much-advertised “freedom of building” simply doesn’t exist here. Midgame carrier play turns into waiting until RNG gives you the blueprint you need. ❌ 3. Broken economy Without mods, the trading system is half-dead. NPC stations overfill, demand/supply logic barely works, your factories stall. To know what to produce or trade, you must use mods. …But see point 1: mods are useless if you didn’t check a box at the start. ❌ 4. Design against the player Mods fix 80% of the game’s issues (UI, trade, fleet management). But unless you knew in advance to enable them, you’re screwed. New player? Learned about mods after 50 hours? Congratulations, your save is obsolete. For a progression-heavy sandbox, this feels like a slap in the face. ⚡ Verdict Avorion looks like freedom but delivers restrictions: No mods in existing saves. No true custom fighters anymore. An economy that doesn’t function without community fixes. It’s a time trap: by the time you realize the limitations, the only solution is to restart. Avorion is a game with massive potential that keeps sabotaging itself. Either start with mods enabled, or don’t bother at all.

A Mix of Minecraft meets EVE, but offline. Build your own ships from blocks, place the turrets where you want, Make your ship a massive battleship with 30 cannons, make it high tech and fast with a lot of shields for scouting, build carriers that release hundreds of customized drones that can shoot any weapon you can build in the game, design your own fighters for your carriers just like you design you own ship. Work your way to the center of the universe obtaining more advanced tech and materials to build your ships from. Start wars, end wars, take over the universe, the game is an absolute blast and I come back and play it fairly often and can easily sink hundreds of hours in to it. 10/10 all around. I would love to see a game like this, on a more modern system, I would likely not play much else for a very long time.

Finally beat the game tonight. I'm going to leave my thoughts now: TLDR; 6/10 overall, 8/10 first half, 3/10 second half. I agree with the negative review DiBBz left. Pretty much all of it. I actually didn't like the game at first, because I had trouble getting into the sandbox groove of 'do what I want'. I also struggled with building a viable ship at first, but the game has options to get around that. Once I started using ONE specific workshop ship, the Icebreaker, I REALLY started to enjoy myself. I got heavily into the sandbox side, ignoring quests and progressing anyways... until i got into the "midgame" ores. That's where I really hit a wall (joke intended if you know), I couldn't progress at the same pace, which was already slow, because of progression barriers. Also, with the new midgame ores i got some new block types for my ships. Sweet right? It would've been, but my helping NPC fleet now wouldn't use their main weapons in combat 90% of the time. Here's the thing... I hadn't looked anything up until now, and now i was looking up how to progress, and it was likely going to be a sizable portion of time to move forward. Mind you, it is provided ingame through a quest chain. However, i was ignoring quests, because it's a sandbox. I didn't know I couldn't continue sandboxing without doing that set of quests. I was also frustrated with my buggy fleet. Then my game started crashing. All together across the 200ish hours, it crashed 4 times. All in the last fifty-ish hours, as i did this wall-passing. The game already has some obvious bugs, and some features that are desperately needed. The bugs weren't awful, mostly occasional graphical issues. Then i stopped having fun. I grinded through, but stopped having fun. That fun didn't come back. After i got past the progress barrier, I was expecting new features. With all the ores so far, there were new features to my ships. The last ores dont really have any. The last set of zones, are basically like the rest of the galaxy. I'd defeated all the bosses almost, and now knew the limits to the game since i'd looked up the progression. So i pushed through. I thought about staying in the near-end to upgrade my ships... but then decided I'll just go probably die on the last boss instead. Even though i had ships that were near invincible pre-wall. I thought because i was skipping effectively 2 ore progressions, i would get wiped. No. I slowly dropped the last bosses health down across an hour, and beat the game. No excitement when i got the endgame items. Instead i felt relief for being done. I tried spending a few minutes to go back and upgrade etc. Instead, i turned it off. Looked at mods to augment the game and campaign. No. I'm ok. Overall, the game is a 6/10. The first half was 8/10, the last half was 3/10. The simple, nongame breaking bugs, and the lack of QoL features really broke me. And ultimately, would I buy it again? For the $20 I spent, definitely. I hope the devs keep updating it, and make it a really amazing game. It has the potential, just isn't there yet. Thanks for reading my review.

<Avorion>中文名叫 艾沃里翁 自带官中的沙盒飞船模拟游戏，可以多人也能单机，非常棒。 可以当成我的世界太空版，反正看着都是方块。 玩起来其实像我的世界版X系列。 玩家操控的永远是飞船，飞船毁了也是简单的无人机回到中立区域。 建造系统挺复杂的，反正是别人的游戏。 游戏有几个预设飞船，但···emm···感觉不是很好使。 创意工坊就一大堆了，可选择困难··· 而自己永远设计不出好飞船··· ···有时候感觉过于自由也···

インペリアルフォース、レジオナルパワー、シュヴァルツシルトが好きだった＆世界だけあって内容はフリーなゲーム（Kenshiなど）が好きな人なら超おすすめです。ここ20年で一番ハマって私生活が壊れるレベルでプレイしてます。 リリース自体はかなり前ですが、現在もアップデートが行われています。 ・宇宙船デザインが楽しい 1隻デザインするのに気が付けば数時間経過していた、なんてことは普通です。ブロックを積む感じですが、ブロックのサイズを1/100以下にできたりするので自由度が高いです。（1x1x0.01などのブロックにすることが可能） なお、ブロックを斜めに設置はできないので、傾斜のあるウィングなどを作る場合は工夫が必要です。あと建築UIは使いづらいです。 ・武器集めが楽しい 基本は敵を倒してドロップした武器を集めます。基本性能はある程度ランダムで他にオプションが付いたりします。レアドロップ？で虹色レーザーとかもあります。制作もできますが、強い武器は制作費が高いので中盤以降になってから。 ・宇宙が広い とにかく広く、全部回るのは物凄く時間がかかります。ただ、イベントのバリエーションは少な目で、すべて周る必要もありません。宇宙の中央が武器作りやアイテム集めに向いているので、一度中央に行くと外周は目的がない限り行きません。あと探索範囲が広がれば広がるほどセーブデータのサイズも大きくなります。中盤までは発生しなかった入力を受け付けなくなるバグ？も出てきます。 ・宇宙ステーションが作れる 船と同じように自由にデザインできます。自動でお金稼ぎをしてくれますが、高額なので中盤以降です。襲撃されることもあるので、他国の支配下に置くか、防衛戦力を用意するかが必要です。 なお、自身のステーションで資源の生成、アイテム売買できるのは便利で、銀河の中央に武器制作工場や研究所を作ると、最高レベルの武器が制作できます。 ・操作がしづらい＆説明不足 海外のゲームではよくあるUIの説明不足は、このゲームにも該当します。特に武器や船のグループ化の方法が分からなくて、見つけるのに苦労しました。 他にも覚えておいた方がいい事項も多いので、日本語Wikiなどは参照した方がよいです。 ・翻訳について 日本語の文章は、ほぼ問題なしです。[strike]ただ、単位の表示がおかしく、単位のKを「000」、Mを「00万」に置き換えているため、本来「5.8 K」と表示されるところが「5.8 000」、「3.1 M」は「3.1 00万」と表示されます（せめて「5.8 千」「3.1 百万」だったら・・・）[/strike] →2025/09/22のバージョンアップでKとMへ修正されました。 ・その他 基本的に後に入手する建造素材の方が強いですが、機動性を重視する場合は中位の最軽量素材も選択肢に入ります。私は基本的にジェネレータ系は最終素材、エンジンやスラスターに最軽量素材を使用しています。当然ながら最終素材をすべての艦で使用するには素材採取に時間がかかるので、旧素材は非戦闘艦やステーションなどに使用するなど用途はあります。 1ランク上の素材になると1.2倍～1.5倍程度性能が上がります。なので某作品のように戦闘力が何十倍、何百倍のインフレになることはありません。 また素材の技術開放はぼったくり価格の購入以外にも入手方法があります。というかシングルプレイ、マルチプレイ共に購入したことはありません。