Dust Fleet

Good enough

Fair play to this solo developer. You have made a knock off of the Original Homeworld, with the space combat having the vertical dimension of to it. The difference here is that rather than a sequential series of missions with a persistent fleet, you now have resources and sectors to manage. All this with a UI and game play loop that will be very familiar to anyone who has played a game like this before. There is a Story Mode that where the Dev presumably got the local 6th form drama class to do the voice over work, and one of their mums to play the villain. But competently done. The story its self while wont change the world, is an engaging one that sets the tone. When one a character refers to the 'Raiders' faction as "Raiders" the leader of the faction replies "We don't really call ourselves that." The Story campaign has a selection of missions, and a few side missions that while are similar format do provide some verity and will run you to around 20ish hours of gameplay. Some of the enemies and problems you encounter require an element of tactical thought. Playing Homeworld and its sequels, one of the major gameplay mechanics is stealing every ship that you possibly could to bolster your own fleet. This mechanic is also evident here, with the addition that if you successfully steal 3x enemy ships you can reverse engineer them, customise them and add them to your fleet. Also unlocking modifying any that you have diligently stolen, as the base models are usually rubbish. Ships also have a number of status and area effects, in the style of the Starfleet Armada series, but I am unsure as to the exact details of those effects, outside of the Chaff. Ships also have experience points that give %s to hit points and DPS, this can be upgraded by throwing resources at it. Nice idea, but only really worth it for the more expensive ships with higher hit points as the cost to upgrade is the same for a frigate as a capital ship. All this rapt up in a package that is visually OK and obviously wears its influences on its sleeve. Babylon 5 stations, Protomolecule from the Expanse is here for some reason, BSG / Space Above and Beyond fighter, to note but a few. My only issues are – It is very easy. At a strategic level I maintained light fleets on boarders with the enemy faction, because I have played games like this before. But the only assaults that I had to deal with were nuisance at worst. If you have wing of APCs and the healer ships, your neighbour popping over is just an opportunity to rob you some more ships. At a tactical level, the aforementioned raiders have no counter to fighters. When being presented with an enormous raider armada that attacked a system I had negligently only defended with a small fleet with one of the light carriers I thought I was doomed. Except I simply deployed that carrier, unleashed the fighter wing, retreated the carrier. After I had finished cooking dinner for the family I came back to the game to see that I had won. Even after ship after ship was destroyed, they were wiped out rather than retreating. Coding for that behaviour, or giving the basic weapon some sort of AA defence would have been a better balancing option. The adversary ships that are in the Story mode are presented as near unstoppable, but in the ‘Sector Assault’ the intergalactic Carjacking approach never failed, making the only challenge being insuring that you APCs get through. If the AI could also use this approach, that might add a new tactical dimension to the game. I have no Idea what the utility of the Refinery Ship is. I thought the Harvester unit would need it to work, but no apparently. These are small gripes. On the whole a 20 hour campaign (Deserts of Kharak was 12 hours) and another 20ish hours (I did wander off to do things) for the Sector Assault, was time well spent. All from a Solo dev. Well done sir.