CSC | Space MMO

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After my rather messy divorce from EVE Online I scoured Steam high and low for something to fill that space mining/crafting void. This isn’t it. This is *FAR* from it. “EVE clone” isn’t even applicable. There’s only so much bad that can be justified by the ‘it’s a alpha/beta build” excuse. There’s games designed by single guys in their basements that have better visual and interactive quality. The UI is very busy, not at all intuitive. The story is laughable (rogue drones? Stop stealing other games’ homework…) and the difficulty is very misleading. I played through the first part of the tutorial up until you get the third ‘freebie’ ship. I get a mission sending me to go kill more drones ok sounds pretty cut and dry the difficulty was listed as ‘rank 10” should be a piece of cake. The mobs there tore my nice new ship a new one and chewed through shields in no time. I kept trying to warp out only to get an obnoxious popup menu stopping me mid-warp and I had to keep cancelling it finally managed to warp out with a sliver of hull remaining because there is no shield/armor/hull just hull and shields require additional modules which hog power like its going out of style. I operated under the impression that this ‘tutorial arc’ acted similar to EVE’s “career missions’ where you are provided with additional missions after the introductory tutorial to cut your teeth in more specialized areas such as mining/combat/exploration etc, but the difficulty of the mobs did not match the rank of the mission nor compare to previous missions of similar level/rank. I even tried doing it again only to run into the same problem. I asked around in the existing chat channel is this mission bugged is it actually meant for a higher level/rank, is there a step I missed? I was told ‘buy a better weapon with premium currency.” (you get 25 ‘premium currency’ ONE time for watching an ad. It is not a daily like other F2P games) WRONG ANSWER. I even asked around in chat if there were any updates coming and the only response I got was ‘SOON tm”. Near as I can tell there have been no official developer responses/updates since 2020 and that is not a promising sign for me. There are still promotions for Halloween seasonal events in game. Even games such as Wolcen and M&B: Bannerlord, which have had notoriously long dev cycles, have regular blogs/roadmaps/AMA’s etc. If this turns out to be a break-out hit, best of wishes, but I’m not going to go down this road again. Absolutely not. Just a few years ago I would’ve happily thrown money at an up-and-coming game company. I work in retail, I know what its like to have to stretch a dollar, live paycheck-to-paycheck, but too many companies have degenerated into petulant snobs and misers I can no longer juggle subscriptions like I used to. I used to justify large game investments as putting food in the tummy of a starving programmer or artist, but this game comes off as a ‘get-rich-quick’ scheme given the omnipresent cash shop, lack of meaningful developer interaction/updates, and bizarre mission availability. I thought I could just grind some step and fetch it missions to build up some game currency maybe buy some better weapons instead of squandering ‘premium’, but the costs are unrealistic and missions simply not there to support ‘free-play’. I’d click on a delivery mission and click and click then be told its ‘unavailable’. Are they somehow first come-first serve? In any case, unless you have money to burn or suffer from pathological altruism, give this game a hard pass.