Beyond Space Remastered Edition

Before actually reviewing the game itself, I need to ask if the description of the product is sarcasm or honesty. I have to go with the benefit of the doubt and say it's sarcasm, since I'm sure no developer would call this a "breathtaking space adventure" or "epic space odyssey worthy of the greatest hollywood blockbusters". - - - - - - - - Conclusion - - - - - - - - Figured I'd put this up in front of the rest of the review: if you can look past some uninspired story, bad voice acting, messy mouse aiming, generic sounds/music, and sometimes lousy menu navigation, then I'm sure you'll enjoy it. I, however, could not. If you see it in the 99 cent aisle, sure, it can give you an hour or two of fun. But for $4, I wouldn't. - - - - - Review - - - - - In short, the game isn't bad. In fact, the gameplay is quite nice. It's a simple, 3D shooter with multiple ships and weapons to choose from. And the graphics are fine for the kind of game it is. But everything else is pretty terrible. Controls aren't impressive, particularly mouse control. I prefer using a mouse for high precision aiming, but this game doesn't have precise aiming. You merely influence the direction the ship goes, almost like there's some sort of mouse acceleration. If you don't want to use this odd aiming, you can try your luck with a joypad or using the arrow keys for aiming. Unfortunately my joypad has a deadzone issue, and while it would have been nice to have an option within the controls to fix that issue, I don't expect it as it's a hardware problem on my end and not theirs. Story (there's a story?) isn't all that immersive. Then again, this game doesn't aim for story, assuming the description of the game is sarcasm and that it really doesn't aim to grab the audience through its "space opera". Voice acting is abysmal and at times, cringeworthy. I'm sure with better scripts, the actors themselves could have done something more impressive. But there's just something about the dialogue that has me shuttering when I hear it. Music isn't bad, but it's nothing special, either. Take any generic space-orientated game and pull the music from it, that's what you have in Beyond Space. Sound effects are fitting enough, but once again, nothing special. Menu navigation. I noticed I had new weapons to choose from but couldn't figure out how. I then figured out that you had to swipe through the weapons in order to view the new ones added to your inventory. As far as I can tell, there are no arrows to click for viewing other weapons. You have to swipe the mouse. I experienced some performance issues in the tutorial and really can't pinpoint the reason. One of my CPU's cores were at full usage for some reason and it gave me some stuttering in the game, but all other levels didn't really have that issue. At least the ones I played, as I wasn't interested in playing for much longer than I already had.

First Impression: This could be a great game for the value Second Impression: Unplayable This game needs a full refactoring on the Gamepad controls! It's just not playable at this state 06/21/14

I've given this game a positive review, despite some very clear issues. When I first bought the game, it's controller support was non-existent. About a month later, they updated. Since I could finally play with my gamepad, I decided to try it. About four missions in, the game suffers from an obnoxious turret scene which was not balanced or fun and terrible out of place in a dog-fighting game. BUT.... -As many people pointed out, the music isn't terrible. I actually enjoyed it and didn't really notice a lack of variety. I was busy blasting fools with laser guns. -Many people complain about the voice-acting. Why? It is terrible, but it is also kind of funny (as in, so bad it is almost good). I am disappointed because it seems like a little more effort on the parts of the voice-actors could have improved everything, but really, the cheesy one-liners the characters deliver are sort of better when they aren't delivered seriously. -Bad/Linear Plot- The missions and overall story line are not very strong. Each mission is fairly short and I'm not really seeing much continuity seven missions in. But I got to shoot things in space in almost every mission and they were kind enough to add either amusing moments or serious ones to make me feel like there was a reason for shooting things in space. -My only real complaint is slow turning. The controls on the gamepad are fine (except for the right joystick controlling throttle in some unexplained way?) but the turning speed for some of these ships is monstrous. Every time I do a 180 manuever or just try a regular turn with the left joystick it seems like my ship and the screen is stuck in mud. It isn't lag, just slow turning. Weird. Not game-breaking though. -Super stupid turret mission. Hated it. I quit playing for 6 months after failing that so many times. Overall, this is an amusing game with good visuals. It should probably be bought on sale. But keep in mind (I think most of the negative views failed to remember this) its regular price is $4. This isn't a game that gets featured in Gaming Weekly. It's a bargain bin game made by a small group of artists and developers. They took the time to TRY and build something epic. They failed (it's good, but not epic). Instead of trying to scam us out of 20 bucks like some other steam 'developers', they put down a fair price and occasionally have sales. That's decent and you can't ask for a better bargain.

I consider myself a flight/space sim enthusiast. This might be the bottom of the barrel of what I've ever played. I'm guessing that they used Freespace or Starlancer as a point of reference while developing this. The game is mission based dogfighting. The good (there's not much): Visuals are pretty good for a budget game. More than passable. I didn't experience any major frame rate drops of anything of that nature. The music is stock but appropriate. The story is weak but doesn't hurt anything. Now, the bad. The enemy AI is not good. It will either fly around aimlessly, or swarm you when it has other objectives. The male voice actor is horrendus, and the female voice is terrible text-to-speech. The controls are worse than both of those. I tried to play this with the mouse/keyboard controls, using a Thrustmaster T.Flight Hotas, and a Logitech gamepad... none are usable, and they're all flawed in seperate ways. I never even got a chance to properly switch my ship's equipment, since when I could get that feature to function at all, it switched it to something I didn't want and was stuck with since I didn't want to burn another 15 minutes into trying to get it to change again. I got approximately halfway through the game (best I can tell) before getting completely stuck on a turret section. Even on the lowest difficulty, I get annihilated due to the turret moving independently of my actions. Rating 2/10

画面很棒的太空射击游戏~ 开场动画特别大气，剧情应该也很不错~可惜没中文看不懂~ 游戏是关卡模式，一关一关过~虽然不知道为啥偶尔会闪退！

Badly ported, the game could be fun, but since i can't actually switch weapons or anything in the hangar (you have to grab the screen and drag, and since the controls are bad it always snaps back to the original weapon) it's getting a negative review. Maybe of they fix the controls I would change this, but since the game is 3/4ths of a year old, i'm not holding out hope for this to happen.

[h1] Black screen and buggy gameplay. [/h1]

Beyond Space is a third-person space shooter that has some very good visuals, but not quite enough content, as half the missions doesn't involve the visuals. The trailer promised some huge space battles where you're one fighter among many other fighters among the huge starships pounding at each other. Yet it's seriously underdelivered. The missions seem to be completely disjointed with no progression. One mission you're playing scout for your space navy, then next mission you're a mercenary flying for some unknown benefactor, then next mission you're flying an obstacle course time trial! And yes, it's the same guy "Max Walker". They even threw in a turret defense mission! The writing is almost... high school bad. "Hal" was so idiotic it's basically the straight man for any sort of bad joke, taking things too literally. That Irish / Scottish accent is just ARGH! And why is he like in command of the fleet or something? He's basically the primary guy Walker talk to... not only fleet control, but scout report, jump gate control, and more. The game is also notorious for "giving" you new weapons, but made it impossible to mount them. The scroll menus for the weapons and components (primary, secondary, shield, and booster) are IMPOSSIBLE to scroll. They require dragging with the mouse, and even then it's nearly impossible. Furthermore, once you did select it, you have to click an additional button to SELECT this weapon or component or else your scrolling were in vain. Once in the cockpit, the visuals are good, but the controls are just... ARGH. None of the ships seem to turn fast enough, and enemy ships seem to be able to turn within its own length. And what's the point of rolling the ship port or starboard? Yet there are two buttons dedicated to that. They don't seem to actually evade anything. Back to the enemy's ridiculous turn rate. You chase down this enemy and you're right behind him, and a few seconds later, the enemy ship had managed to turn 120 degrees and flew past you WITHOUT slowing down. And what's worse, this happens from the smallest light fighters to even corvettes / gunboats that are much larger than fighters. And in this universe, corvettes have afterburners (WTF?!) and can pull away from you, even on full afterburners. The weapons don't feel much different. Primary weapons are infinite ammo, being energy based. Any improvements are minor (like slightly higher firing rate, or trade firing rate for damage, and so on). The "secondary" weapons are either heavy guns or missiles, but with limited ammo that has no replenishment within mission... once you're out, you're out, period, and had to rely on guns only. The weapons controls are also weird. With only two buttons, you'd think they'd just do one button for primary and one button for secondary, but no. It's one button to shoot, and one button to switch weapons. That's right, you can't shoot both guns together. ARGH! No "all guns" alpha strike! Which brings me to my main complaint: the bosses. There are a couple boss fights in this game, where you need to take down a supership, that's heads and tails better than yours, but may also be escorted. The bosses are usually corvettes of some sort... but they are hardly slow moving. No, they are as fast, if not occasionally faster than you, and they have 360 tracking turrets so deadspots where you can't get hit are almost impossible to find (hint: try the "bottom") They also launch missiles (sometimes) and may be escorted by fighters (sometimes). And you need to kill them by wearing them down... and yes, they can be shielded too. So what usually happens is they keep lobbing missiles and turret shots at you, while you try to shoot them to wear down their shields so you can bust them with heavy weapons, but due to the bad turning radius of your own ship (and their cheating ships) you end up using all your heavy weapons to no appreciable effect, or got it half dead, then you got chewed to pieces when you try regular strafing runs. The bosses are just TOO HARD, too maneuverable. Sound is not too bad, dialog is professionally recorded, and I'm sure the voice actors did what they could. But it's not a good script. Have to say though, visuals are gorgeous on 1680x1050, and didn't have to much with the resolution much. Just make sure your gamepad is connected and ready BEFORE you start the game, or else the game won't see it. period. All in all, bad bosses, bad humor, missions that really make no sense, and so on, made this game ibarely tolerable, and you should instead pay for the classic Freespace 2 or even Descent: Freespace for about the same price and enjoy that instead.