Defect

Defect is a clever idea - a constant cycle of 'design a ship and then fight it', with a steady flow of new equipment opening up, and increasingly challenging missions to complete (all ending with you fighting your old vessel). The idea is good, and frankly the execution isn't bad. However, it becomes clear rapidly that the game has some problems, and some serious difficulty spikes. You cannot defeat certain (critical) missions without unlocking certain equipment, so you have to go back and replay older missions to grind for the older stuff. Ironically though, many other missions can be completed with the same ship you had before (I must have completed 5 or 10 missions in a row with just one unchanging ship design) - as long as you're a better pilot than the computer (which you are). This means that the game feels like a boring grind with occasional bouts of 'completely start again and make something new'. Then, out of nowhere the game requires that you 'defeat these two way overpowered bosses to progress', which force explicit grinding of the completed missions to unlock better weaponry. I've no idea how to defeat the Pirate Prime Minister and frankly, I'm not sure i want to work it out. The puzzle element is through the game's insistence that there is a single upper limit (power) on your ship. Every add-on part requires either Power or Crew or both, and while you can convert power to crew and vice versa, you cannot create either. Secondly, in order to maximise speed, mass must be diminished, though each item has its own armour rating. So you balance adding two 10-person crew pods, over one 20-person pod, because the first option is lighter, but the second option has better armour. Where the game excels, is in using these restrictions to force the player to build a perfect ship for the scenario that can also beat your last ship, but those moments where this is actually required are a rarity, and there's several mission types that render this simply impossible. There's a side-mission (near the Pirate Prime Minister) where you must build the fastest possible ship with the weakest possible core in order to take part in a race, and then when you win the race (just, by stripping everything out, including guns) you have to somehow defeat your previous ship (which given the stage of the game, has a 3rd level core, and is no doubt laid out with guns). Suffice to say, i did not manage to do this. I assume that you need to go back and play earlier levels to grind with increasingly weak ships until you can get something nice and weak. Graphically the game is pretty, and it's possible to design some gorgeous ships, but you see all these pretty screenshots of spaceships above - beautiful aren't they. You won't be using those. You'll be using the ugly box hull and nothing else - it's the best armour to mass ratio, so why use anything else (and if you need twice the armour just stack a second one on top of the first. In fact, just stack everything on top of the power-core and be done. The sad truth is that the game's two core tenets (limited power/crew 'budget' and having to fight your own ship after a mission), is the very thing that kills the game's desire to let you build pretty spaceships. The other big issue, given how easy it is to die, and the need to grind, is how irritatingly slow it is to get back into a mission - back to the mission select, click launch, watch the setup cutscene, watch your ship warp in, click through the multiple text boxes of 'story' while the camera zooms in and out multiple times and finally, you'll be able to fly. If the only reason you're restarting is because a single missile clipped you after 10 minutes of ducking and weaving, well, you get pretty irritated with the slow restart. The final complaint sadly, is simply that the game was abandoned in 2016. It's a crying shame, there's a genuinely great game concept here, and at a price of $7 Canadian dollars, it's hard not to say it's worth a try, but if like me, you bought this after reading a PCGamer story about this genius idea of a game, I'm sorry to say, it's just not here.