Catharage

I love the idea of the game. I'm not refunding this, I think there's a great core game underneath. The visuals and controls of it hold it back significantly. I don't mean the models, they are fine. Rather you are squinting at everything trying to decide if you saw something important glint through pea soup space, or being blinded by the sun when your camera glances in that direction. It would be massively improved if they were both brighter, and targetable by your tractor system. Specifically on the tiny glints are the very important purple yellow and green ones that are the meta progression. The font isn't great for visual clarity either. No hotkeys for weapons or systems means you're trying to hover over the approaching enemy and tell your guns to shoot. Being able to mouse over a target and tap the weapon key to target it would make things like shooting down incoming missiles much more enjoyable.

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.

It's not a bad game at it's core, but it definitely needs more work. From optimization to poorly designed and explained mechanics and UI... it's rough. I have an OK mid range pc, running on an rtx 3090ti an i9-10850k and 32g of ddr4, this game makes my pc fans spin up like a jet engine. Even after lowering my resolution and adjusting the minimal graphics options available, there was still massive system draw from this game. The mechanics are often either poorly explained or poorly implemented. I was roughly 45 minutes to an hour into a run with what I think is one of the more tanky ships available (battlecruiser) and had just moved into the medium difficulty area. Shortly after entering I was one shotted by some enemy beyond sensor range or unidentifiable mechanic. My ship, for those who understand the numbers and mechanics, had 49 shields, 20 armor, and 137hp, and had regen on all 3 of these stats. Now I don't mind a learning curve and tough or challenging encounters, I enjoy playing games like dark souls and elden ring, but there was literally no information or explanation as to what had happened, or for any of my other runs in regard to this topic. It was game over screen and then main menu... The MAJOR problem here is that you have to manually end your run to gain any kind of progress or resources, of which I had a significant amount of at the time of this happening. If you die, you get nothing. This is an extremely flawed design choice where the core principal of rogue likes is incremental progress... Start, die, gain small progress and slight power ups, repeat and go further.

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.

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.

Great capital ship space game, making the best combo of Rebel Galaxy, eve offline, roguelikes and extraction. Great variety of progression, weapons, ships, enemies, playstyles/builds. You feel powerful yet need to be thinking and cautious. Criticisms as of this early build, but the game is still great: Controls slightly unintuitive, font choice is bad, stat cards on equipment upgrade compare needs to be like-for-like, picking out distant visual objects against some of the backgrounds or your own sensor bubble is very difficult.

Scratches a Homeworld-EVE-Flotilla like itch I wasn't aware I had.

Camera controls are terrible, space is dim and ugly, game for those who love torture.

the controls, visuals and camera controls are just too annoying.