Eterium

Clearly a hommage to the space combat sims of the 1990's. Let's compare it to modern games (small ships only): ..............................................Eterium.....X4:F......Elite:D Directional shields.................yes.........no..........no Directional armor...................yes.........no..........no cockpit damage.....................yes.........no..........yes cockpit MFDs........................yes.........no..........no ship component damage......yes.........no...........no smart combat AI...................yes.........no...........no interesting story....................yes.........yes?........no TrackIR support.....................no.........yes.........yes To enjoy this game you need a joystick or HOTAS. The story and dialogues obviously suffer from the budget constraints but the focus is on the fast paced space combat simulation anyway. That is where the game shines!

This is a badly translated 2D visual novel with a wing commander ripoff stapled to it. Controls are a little loose, but this game does succeed in providing a Wing-Commander like experience with 4K graphics, reasonable playability, and tolerable, if low quality graphics. The story is very bad, however. I'm on the border of this one but because the game does check through the basic minimum PC requirements (lots of customisability for controls and graphics), and because there are so very few space sims of any degree of quality on Steam, I'll give this a tentative thumbs up, for die hard space sim fans.

Very good--> Controls, music, sounds, space combat, good story, gameplay. Great---> cockpit and exterior ship graphics, along with the outerspace atmosphere with planets in the background have great graphics also. Great--->, wingman interface controls with weapons along with coms. I don't know why everyone is saying this game has bad controls. It is great with a game pad or a joystick, but if the key board and mouse is your thing go for it. Very cool old school 80's and 90's feeling space shooter. The only issue I have with this game is Its very repetive and the explosion graphics and gun fire along with the character graphics could of been better, but this game is fun. If you like space sims or grew up with Wing Commander, I reconmend this.

I couldn't even play the game. First, the game didn't configure itself properly for my X52 HOTAS. Then, once I restored defaults -- it did, but didn't assign anything to actually increasing or decreasing the throttle. So, I went to configure that, only to find out that you COULD NOT assign the Z axis to any of the items. The Z axis, by the way, is the THROTTLE in my HOTAS. Also, it would think that the mode switch on the joystick was constantly polling, so assigning anything meant holding whatever you wanted to assign and hope it chose that and -not- the mode stick. I can't speak to the game itself, because I couldn't even play it -- because it doesn't support the X52 properly and won't let me configure it. Given that the game is four years old -- I don't expect any updates or patches. There's no Twitter or Facebook page that I can find, and their official forums are non-functional. Don't buy this if you have a HOTAS and want to use it with it (or have a joystick that has a throttle slider on it, either, it'll have the same issue!)

I just wanted the experience shown in the videos, but after trying to scroll through the "story" diologue I couldn't get the flight controls down, and after some practice and reading I gave up.

It feels like I can't really aim or judge distances. The ship's UI is hard to read, and the tutorial of the first mission doesn't do a great job of explaining anything except the most basic controls (and it doesn't even cover all of those - it tells you which button is full throttle, but not which button is the brake!). I played the first mission 3 times. Each time, I got zero kills, and in two of them I died because I flew into an obstacle. I'm not a novice to these games - I loved Freespace and Freespace 2, and I'm an on-and-off player of Star Citizen. But I don't remember having nearly as much difficulty getting into any of those. Also, look *very* carefully at the reviews. At the time of this writing, there are *65* reviews, and 29 of them are negative. I don't know why the rating doesn't take that into account.