Pretty good. And the Persistence Update where you actually get to keep your stuff is great too, having played it, I figure that without that, I probably would have refunded. I don't think the full creativity of being able to build your ship block by block is a good fit for the rogue-like format so it's nice that the dev listened and changed how the progression work.
Basically now no matter what you keep your ship and your ship building resource. Though you still need to complete a bounty, i.e. kill the boss, to get exp to level up so you have a higher cost limit for your ship. But otherwise, at the beginning, even failures still gives progress, as long as you've been collecting/looting resources.
The ship building here is simpler than Cosmoteer. For example, turrets can fire through each other for one, and I can't remember, but I'm fairly certain that your guns can also fire through the hull, they are located up top I guess. No crew so you don't have to plan their route and all that. I like it though, finally now I can build ships that look good and play good instead of another brick with some edges.
Relative simplicity aside, it does have a bunch of stuff that isn't in Cosmotter. For example, it has joints! The trailer might show it, but there is this enemy ship that's an eel, and it moves like one because it has joints. There are also enemies with jaws that open and shut as a melee unit, piston attacks and even rowboats. More practically for ranged combat though, there is an aiming joint that allows you to turn fixed guns into a player created turret. One of the inbuilt ships even have that, where it turns a fixed forward railgun battery into an omnidirectional railgun turret.
Combat feels better here, with the boost ability, you'll be zipping around enemies, dodging fire and getting into their weak spots. Most of the earlier enemies would have their core at the rear, and killing it just kills the whole ship. Eventually though as you raise in rank, you'll be building your dreadnaught and be able to just stand and fight your enemies. And with player skill bonuses, even take on entire fleets. Though you probably still need to retreat and repair if taking on multiple dreadnaught class enemies, but with overlapping shields, you'll be near impervious to smaller enemies. The sense of progression there feels really good. Especially since even at high levels enemies do still have the smaller early game ships, like in a real fleet. So you don't really feel like even when you go big, that it still feels like you never really get that much more powerful.
You only get the one ship though, so no fleet. But there are confilict sectors where you can join one side to help them fight the other in a fleet battle.
But the real star of the show are the boss fights. Every run you do, called a bounty, culminates in a fight with a boss. At the beginning, you'll be dodging fire, sniping off weak points and slowly whitling them down, but eventually you can stand and fight when you reach dreadnaught level. Again, the sense of progression. For higher level bosses, you'll probably still need to pull back for repairs though.
Though speaking of bosses, there is also this one other neat thing... And that is the bosses with all their special ability, custom stats, separate phases and also selected invulnerable parts depending on boss... all this are completely afaict built within the in game ship designer itself! Once you've met a boss, you can just go into the sandbox and load up the boss itself and you can see all the special boss stuff in a special boss tab. What that means is that if you have the creativity, you can build your own bosses as well! Without needing any sort of external program or anything, it's all done in game. It reminds me of the good old days when RTSes have map editors and you can do a ton of fun stuff in them. Now it's not that powerful, but it's a start, and still way more than modern games do.
Also I'll note that there are 5 factions (3 at start, 2 unlockable) you can choose, each one has it's own tech tree, though you can also get non-faction BPs when you kill stuff. But more importantly, it also has it's own faction skills, this one you cannot change. Depending on the skills, it might shoehorn you into a specific ship design, for example, Shadow Syndicate, they prefer lasers and advanced shields as per description, and that's what their skills show horn you into. Like of the 5-6 skills, two of them are for improving your lasers and you don't have generic damage bonuses. I heard other factions do have more generic skills though. And also unique faction BPs, though I'm not actually sure if those can drop from kills. And they really are unique, you get tech points to unlock BPs for unlimited use, but for uniques, you basically buy a copy of the module, so you need to buy a second one if you want that.
I'll also note that of my current 27 hours of gameplay, I've only played one faction, and am about to reach max level. That means I still have 4 other factions with their own skills with different bonuses favoring different builds. Though I guess at endgame for my build style, they'll probably end up pretty similar. Well, missiles have guidance so that is something, and lasers seems to be good for precision and drilling straight for their core, so perhaps there would be some gameplay differences with other less precise weapons.
But yeah, it's fairly cheap. Get it if you like building ships. And using them against fun bosses, or even building your own to share. There are 5-6 bosses now, and 1 of them atm even has an Insane difficulty version. Otherwise difficulty just increases enemy fleet sizes, but not enemy stats. Oh and there is also an arena to test cost limited builds or something. Never really done that though, but I guess some people would like it. I prefer just building big.
