Catharage

Judging by other reviews, Catharage is probably not for everyone, because Catharage does things differently. To me, it's a breath of fresh air in its genre(s). It's a bit rough around the edges, but it's also a one-man project, and this one man is definitely also listening to feedback. Change is just not guaranteed or necessarily fast. In terms of gameplay, it finds a nice middle(ish)-of-the-road between an arcade and hardcore experience. The setup is straightforward and especially the early game is pretty easy going. With experience, you learn to pick your battles rather than just diving into every fight, and if you don't mind slow progress, you can take it as easy as you like, up to a point. The extraction aspect makes for a good risk/reward incentive without forcing you into it. Graphically, personally, I like the kind of abstracted style. I'm generally quite tired of the generic "low poly, no textures"-look, but in this context it works well and, in a rare twist, I think more intricate visuals would detract from the experience. I do hope for more optimisation down the line as the otherwise humble visuals shouldn't put this much strain on the GPU. Not that my machine has framerate issues, but it does heat the room up nicely... :') The only things I actively miss are some more tooltips and a more comprehensive inventory overview. All the rest is pretty much down to polish and maybe some rebalancing of e.g. equipment tiers. Are there things I would have done differently? Absolutely, and if I ever get around to it, perhaps I will, but not without generously acknowledging Catharage as a major inspiration. It would just also be a fundamentally different experience. At the end of the day, I also think that people who don't want things to be different, to have the same control scheme, same move sets, same level of polish everywhere should just steer clear of smaller games and devs like this. If you want safety, bigger studios are much more conservative and scared to try new things. A bigger studio would never have made this, so I'm glad it got made anyway.

I tried to play this game but the UI and controls are really bad. It's hard to tell what I can interact with. It's hard to tell what I can click on or when I can click on something. Why is there a random alternate camera view that is just slightly askew from the normal 3rd person view? The zoomed out/overview view makes sense, but everything is so small its really hard to tell again what I can interact with. The actual ship/controls are very weird and make me think the developer has never played another space/ship/flight game before. The zoomed out view doesn't allow for RTS style controls, and the 3rd person view doesn't allow for intuitive controls like in Everspace/NMS/etc. Why is throttle controlled with x/c? In case you haven't used a keyboard before, its pretty hard to press WASD AND X/C at the same time. Other people have already solved these problems in elegant ways.

Great base to what could be an amazing game, but numerous times I have now had insta-deaths on long runs(+3 hrs each.). For some reason the game cant handle a certain DPS input, Ive died with full health, armor and some shield. This can be brutal as the game is an extraction based progression. having all your efforts wasted kills the fun. Hoping updates in future can make this suitable for more play.

Why does it say "Windows 11" in "minimal requirement" when it works without any problem on 10? Have they done no testing? Considering how many people are still on Windows 10. I wonder how many people won't buy their game because of that? Anyway. The game is fine but you have to be very patient and have a fair chunk of free time because everything moves as if space was full of molasses.

Camera controls feel off in a bad way, it makes it somewhat sickening to play compared to some other spaceship games. I don't really know how to describe it but the camera system is just very off putting. Also why can't I see if my gun can shoot a target, the tutorial really showed me how awkward it is to just try and fight something. For some reason my laser weapons were outranged by the enemy cannons and my ability to maneuver was just confusing.

Maybe this game is just not for me. Essentially every aspect, every system, and every mechanic is, to my eye, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ terrible. The controls suck - It's a constant battle and completely unintuitive. The camera is an untamed beast, and every mode feels wrong. I'm constantly trying to figure out if I'm supposed to treat this as a plane, a person, or a boat. The visual fidelity sucks - I can't SEE anything. What's that little blobbish square? Is it loot? Is it part of the map? I don't know, because the text is microscopic and possibly upside-down. The 3D aspect sucks - This may just be because the camera controls are so poorly done, but WHY is this a thing? What game mechanic exists here that requires or even benefits from full 3D traversal with a freely rotating camera and very few frames of reference? It's not cool; it's irritating and meaningless. Homeworld, my favorite example of a fully 3D playspace done right, figured out 27 years ago how to do this in a way that makes sense. The pacing sucks - I'm sorry, I'm all for long pauses in games that can actually pull it off, but this is not one of them. Taking 5+ minutes to cruise between activities does not work when the visuals are this basic, and when the map is so bad I can't actively figure ♥♥♥♥ out on it. I've never played a SLOWER roguelite in my life. Wrong genre to do that in, I think. The targeting and combat sucks - I assume there's some manner of EW at play that the game doesn't bother telling me, but I find it asinine to bother with ranges on weaponry when I cannot target or shoot at an enemy until they're practically kissing me. The weapons themselves are a fascinating combination of opaque AND generic. Combat visuals, sound effects and mechanics are all lackluster. Overall the game feels like a college freshman class assignment. Maybe there's some brilliant concept behind it that I'm not discerning, but maybe it's just bad.

Don't be fooled, this game is not slow-paced when a host of missiles are on your tail, while cannons narrowly miss tapping your belly, whether or not you notice your shields are down. The lack of controller support, save for a steam deck or steam controller, which I hear it does capably, does not hold back your mobility. I am mostly so far a demo player of this game, but my few runs in the full game show immediately the quality of life improvements present in the full game that are sadly absent in the demo. Great fun, fully worth the full price.

I will preface this review by saying this game isn't for everyone, but I found that it was for me. This is the kind of game you get with a solo indie developer who understands his vision and refuses to water it down to a mass-market commodity. It is initially inscrutable, which I personally found intriguing but may be a source of frustration for others. It appears complex, but the essential game loop is actually simple and familiar. Its gameplay alternates between tranquillity verging on boredom and pandemonium, usually culminating in disbelief when your hours-long run is ended abruptly and rudely. The aspect of the game that players will likely find most polarizing however, are the ship and camera controls. Although the developer has attempted to streamline and facilitate customisation of the controls since the initial release, they are still inherently complex and for the majority I suspect, highly unintuitive. If you are not comfortable with 6DoF control, this game is not for you. If you tried Homeworld and were frustrated with the camera, this game is not for you. You have been warned. Persevere, and you will find that the meat of the game is resource gathering and ship-to-ship combat, both of which are relatively straight-forward in execution. For combat, again think Homeworld, but with fine-grain control over the weapons and abilities of an individual ship. You do also have the optional opportunity to command a minor fleet in a limited fashion, but this is not a feature I relied on heavily. Through the many classes of ship on offer and ranged against you, there was enough nuance and variety in these mechanics that I didn't begin to feel jaded until I completed the initial goal of the game around hour 30. To my surprise, this unlocked a further layer of end-game content that I wasn't expecting and which provided an ongoing challenge. Taking this account with the relatively low asking price, the game offers a great dollar-to-entertainment ratio. As a rogue-like, the gameplay loop and resulting progression is both familiar and well-crafted, with a large contingent of unlocks and permanent upgrades to accumulate, supporting a variety of feasible play-styles. The resources that these unlocks require are only obtained when extracting (deliberately choosing to end a run), so there is always an element of risk/reward involved in each run. Extract too early and you receive a relatively paltry reward compared to the initial effort required to mould your ship into something remotely effective. Continue to test your luck in search of additional loot and despite frequently feeling over-powered, it is likely that eventually you will be murdered at long range by a single unexpected shot. Despite the justifiable feeling of unfairness that accompanies this, it is a testament to the compelling “one more run” nature of the game that I continue to play. The game utilises an untextured and minimalist approach that seems to be common recently in Unity-developed games. In this case, it results in attractive and frequently grand visuals, aided by the backdrop of immense, mysterious and ruined structures that populate the environment. Both the stability and performance of the game was adequate on a mid-range machine. I experienced only the occasional crash when saving and then attempting to resume a run. Thankfully, the game recognised this and honoured the resources that I had accumulated, significantly reducing the impact of this issue. I look forward to seeing more from this developer.