Escape Space

Was excited to play this and really disappointed. I could've refunded but I hope the dev actually improves this as there's a good game in it. The repetition: Once you've hit level 20, all the levels become very samey just different factions. You have to grind levels as levels don't give you anything bar harder difficulty. I got to 75 then called it a day as was so bored The grind: Even on the harder levels you only get 1000-1500 chips, so with upgrades costing 5-10k, it's tedious, especially as the levels are all the same The weapons/mods: Takes ages to get the agility mod and until then the ship is like a beached whale. Tediously slow. Also the weapons all feel samey. They need upgrades, more distinction. Looks nice, plays nice, but it's let down by repetitive grinding. Buy if it's improved or on sale

I played the demo for about 2 hours, and really enjoyed it. Today I've played about 2 hours of the full game, and it's even better than the demo was. There have been lots of QOL improvements based on player feedback that have really made the game better all around. So, how does it stand out as a shmup? The contract mission selection gives you the choice of playing your favorite mission types as well as keeping it varied enough that you'll always have the option to play something different. There's also a pretty decent upgrade tree that will allow you to improve your ship. You can also buy new weapons and mods, which serve as special attacks or defensive statuses. The cool thing about this is you're buying from the factions so your standing with them is going to cause the price to increase or decrease. In between the contract missions you will also have priority missions which are more story based and have a fixed difficulty. They are similar to the contract missions, but they serve to progress the story and often have specific rewards. Mission types that I've played so far: Survival: It's what it sounds like. You have to survive through multiple waves of increasingly difficult enemies, with the option to continue for a longer time in an attempt at receiving a greater reward. Escort: You have a ship that's following you and is a noncombatant. It'll move in line with you so you're busy blowing up ships and navigating out of the line of fire or objects flying through space. Elimination: Similar to survival but you'll have far less waves, and it will culminate with a collection of more difficult ships during the final wave. Collect: Shoot ships, collect a certain amount of things. It's a pretty simple concept but it's one of the catchier modes. This is a game that you can jump into for a few minutes or a few hours. Super easy to pick up, a bit more complicated to truly master. I'll update the review with a video review once I've hit the level cap. So, maybe in a week or two.

Big fan of this game. It's easy to find flow in dodging bullets and dogfighting enemies. If you want to speed up your experience gain, play survival missions for additional waves. Well done and looks great in 4k!

I like this game because you think you know the gameplay (already seen a lot of 'shot them up in space'), but here there are a lot of surprises. Throughout your career you will have to make choices, mods, equipment and also factions, missions... The design of the enemy ships is creative, and their behavior always manages to surprise me (especially bosses) with different mission types (escort, survival, etc.) Each game session is short, and does not look like the previous one. I'm just starting to play (for a few hours) and I won't be bored ! I can play this game a few per day, to build a character who will be loved by the 3 factions ;) see you tomorrow !

Really nice Shmup, lovely pixel art and pretty cool spaceships (tons of spaceships) !! The game is giving sensations thanks to its challenging gameplay and the faction feature is unusual, it add that little something to the challenge ! I also appreciate the various mods and the customisation that we can add/buy for the spaceship and which change the gameplay !! Only the bosses are maybe a bit weak but beside that I can't wait for more and I can't wait for the future updates !!

Really fun!!. I have been a fan of the old school classics, like Xenon 2, Swiv, R-type, and this has captured that essence and turned it into a really enjoyable game. The overheating system , took me a while to get used to , but it really is a good discipline to try and maintain the strong fire power. Fully recommended, Nice going

Easy to learn (even for me!)! The feel is really good and there's a wide variety of USEFUL customisations! So it's cool! If you like Bullet hell and old school shoot em ups but with a more modern aesthetic check it out :o (Good music by the way ) (SteamDeck Friendly)

The game goes for the pure shooter experience; all you have is a fire button and movement. It’s very easy to play because it doesn’t have any complicated mechanics. The only thing you need to worry about is overheating for your main gun; if you fill the heat bar all the way, the ship won’t be able to fire for a few moments. On the other hand, your bullets become much stronger close to the danger zone. You choose missions from a menu. They are separated into numerous categories, including survival, elimination, and a few more. Since all modes share the primary objective of killing enemies, they aren't anything that different from one another. Missions only take a few minutes and follow the same path: eliminate a few enemy waves, and sometimes a stronger elite unit or units. Missions come from one of the three factions. Since factions hate each other, taking a mission will drop your reputation with one of the factions. The faction you’ll be following depends on the first mission you pick. This means you can’t immediately juggle between different missions and keep reputation neutral with all factions. Each completed mission increases your overall level. Once you reach a certain point, you can play the story missions. Completing story missions offers you more missions to choose from, and unlocks better rewards and harder stages. After a while, you can even start working for every faction. Reputation matters when you’re buying stuff. Each faction sells its own weapons and mods. If your standing with them is excellent, you’ll get a discount. However, you'll have to spend a lot more if they despise you. Because you only have three weapons per faction, plus more that you gain throughout the game, the selection is decent but not outstanding. One minor problem is that you have no idea how strong the weapon is or how quickly it may overheat. All you can see is the attack pattern. The ship can only have one weapon. The same goes for mods. These are little perks that improve your chances in a mission. Some of them are healing, faster shooting, shield, and so on. The other important thing are permanent upgrades. There are eight different stats, including firerate, cooldown, and magnetic field for attracting stuff. Each stat can be upgraded several times to increase its usefulness. Unlike weapons and mods, upgrades require special chipsets that need to be collected from destroyed enemies. Here's where the grind comes in. These upgrades are very expensive, and since there are no perks to increase the number of chipsets, you'll have to play several hours to get enough for a single purchase. A lot of these upgrades feel useless because you simply won't be able to afford them during normal play.

Première impression après quelques parties. Prise en main très rapide, Hâte de continuer et de faire évoluer mon vaisseau !

Cool music, decent art, core loop is really exciting on paper, in practice I found too many issues to really enjoy the game. But I really found the space mercenary fantasy really cool and wanted to share my excitement for the game in the form of (hopefully) constructive feedback. [b]TL;DR:[/b] pacing is way off in between milestones. Until medium/hard stages are unlocked, the game felt like a massive slug. Factions system feels unimpactful. [b]EDIT:[/b] I came back to the game and gave it more time: I have good fun with all the cool end game content. For one main reason: the discovery rate (new content appearance) is three times more generous at the end. That's usually the oppposite in games, for a good reason. It's really a shame the early game felt so un-engaging while the mid/late game content is packed with missions, areas, and enemies. It's all in the pacing. The upgrade / weapon aquisition also feels weird: I reached Nightmare missions with something like 15% of all upgrades maybe? And I used the last Outlaw weapon for most of the game. That's very poor use and distribution of your valuable content IMO. [h2]Original review focused on early user experience feedback:[/h2] [h3]Sluggish feeling[/h3] I begun the game 10min ago and I feel like I'm having 20 sec of gameplay with super short missions, then 20 sec wait. Everything that is not gameplay is too slow: level start animation, level end animation, wait for dialog opening, wait for dialog title animation, wait for word appearing, wait for skip button... Then wait for teleportation. Half my play time is spent waiting instead of playing. Most end game message say "mission done, good job" so they aren't worth waiting for. This become less annoying when longer missions arrive but was a big pain in the ass in the beginning. You could technically discard this entire point if I had longer mission available early on (easy but long missions, I guess). [h3]Repetitiveness and big pacing issue[/h3] 10 missions done and the feeling of repetition is very strong already. Enemies moving around and shooting fast projectiles, kinda work as a pattern, except if most of them do the same, with slightly different parameters. That makes for stages which lacks mecanical identiy and fail to provide a clear level design emerging from bullets, satisfying to learn and beat. While I love the idea of contract missions, the generated content feels generic very quickly unfortunately. After a dozen of samy mission, with nothing happening, I was about to give up on the game when suddently.. New mission with scenario, new background, new enemies, new music, new powerup system, new system with allies fighting with me, and a BOSS, finally. That's cool! But it arrives after the poor level design from a dozen of samy generic contracts has almost entirely killed the game experience for me. The main issue here is that you've spaced out too much your interesting content and added too much weirdly short filler in between. After that, again, I almost dropped the game before the Hard main mission was introduced. Important pacing issue overall in my opinion. [h3]Factions without the umpf[/h3] I like factions system in general, but here the implementation feels off. Either you make me choose a faction before the game start, and that's it. Or you make me navigate a dynamic simulation with gain/loss of reputation that have meaningful implication depending on my on going choice. Right now I see my reputation growing with the outlaw and reducing with the others, but what use is that metric? How does it feeds into the system of the overall simulation? Yes, I unlock Outlaw mods and weapons, get reduced prices, that's nice. But that would work just as well with a linear Outlaw side quest like any rpg. No need for a point based faction system with reputation, it's been 20 missions and I never had the choice to take another faction contract. I'm really confused as to the purpose of the reputation points so far. EDIT: I'm now level 35, for some reason I can do mission for scientist now. Not sure what's the purpose of that since I own max stuff from the Outlaws... I guess the point is to be able to do the other story missions without the middle grind? It increases the feeling that faction choice don't matter anyway. It feels overall very clunky to me. [h3]Level up for what?[/h3] Never understood what level up was used for. EDIT: noticed it got lock at level 30 until I beat the main mission. So I now suspect that levels are used to unlock main missions? If that's the case that's quite unintuitive. I'd rather have a simple Fame level, that slowly increase like xp, and everytime it fills the bar, I reach a new Fame level, which would unlock the next main mission. That would make more sense thematically and would provide a clear milestone regarding when the next cool content bit will arrive, providing an incentive to carry on. [h3]Smaller notes[/h3] - [b]Failing a mission[/b]: Restarting a mission because I got one shot by an obstacle feels sluggish. Have to wait for the mission result, no restart button, go back to HUB, launch mission again and rewatch the entire non-skipable cutscene. - [b]Too tanky[/b]: never failed a single mission so far (except for being one shot by obstacle), I took lot of hits because I'm not particularly skilled, but still I outlived all oponents easily. That doesn't help making the idea of upgrade exciting, because it doen't feel needed. EDIT: got my first death from the trio boss in Harduous mode. That's loooong overdue. - [b]SFX[/b]: Got the first outlaw weapon, the sound design is so abnoxious that I have to fully mute the sound, ouch! Lots of sfx are missing. Xp gain, Level up, menu navigation, collect loots, etc. - [b]Trolling Chest[/b]: That chest that appear after the end of the level that you cannot shoot because your gun are locked (happened many times) - The back button should be usable to unpause the game. Stopped playing but thumb up because I support your initiative. Would insta buy an improved sequel or invest more time in the next updates :) [h2]Good luck with future updates[/h2]