Hazeron Starship

EDIT : Well from all the comments, and no updates for a year, it looks like this game is abandoned. Sad, so sad. Original Post: One of my favorite games. Sure the graphics are not up to today's standards, even with my RTX 3060 GPU. However, the game-play is why I love this game. The things you can do, well even other games I play, doesn't have this ability. Although they are trying. Why the thumbs down ? Well it's a forced-internet game. Even though it's single player. The original code still uses a DRM that the current dev could fix if he has the time. As an OpenGL graphic developer and professional 3D modeler and animator, I know this to be true. Either way, get the game if you are online all the time. But for those of us, and there are more of us offline players then people think, we can't play this. Sad too, I love this game. I WILL re-buy this game IF that DRM issue (Offline Mode) is ever fixed. Cheers

If you're here because you were a fan of shores of hazeron, turn away. Shores is gone. This game in its current state has had all the actual gameplay elements stripped away from it. No multiplayer, A reworked blueprint system that is far too complex and cumbersome to be usable to anyone who doesnt want to invest hundreds of hours in developing skills at using hax's own CAD software, and absolutely no challenge whatsoever. If you're a new player, just leave. This game is the bastardized shell of a 15 year old MMO with basically no care taken to adapt the actual gameplay for a singleplayer experience. The dev "team" is a single man who does whatever he feels like regardless of the opinions of the players and updates very sporadically about half the year, and takes the other half to tend to his farm.

There have been no updates in over a year, and the developer has been radio silent. Many things are missing from the game, such as AI empires to interact with. Last time I played, there really wasn't much to do. Even though you can make all kinds of things with a lot of freedom, there's not much to really do with any of it and the visuals don't exactly inspire me to make anything just for the sake of it. I [i]love[/i] mechanically unique and complex games, and this is a game that [i]should[/i] be right up my alley. But if all we're going to be left with is an unfinished singleplayer port of a game that was initially designed as an MMO, then I absolutely cannot recommend anyone spend money on this. If the game is updated and progress is made, I will update this review should the game reach a properly playable state. I never played Shores of Hazeron, and never even knew it existed, so my experience with Hazeron comes exclusively from this release. I have no nostalgia for the original, I only saw this iteration and thought it looked like an interesting experience. If you're going to charge money for something, it should be worthy of the price you're asking for. This just... wasn't.

This is Bug Central, yet I can't stop playing? UI is lacking something fierce; Tutorial that should have been fixed years ago, yet still fails to explain the basics of item(torch) transfer; Graphics is terrible; Bugs everywhere of various severity that make the game borderline unplayable; Repeatability of some elements... Overal terrible first impression. Yet once you get past tutorial phase the sheer scale and freedom, the richness of mechanics make this game appealing to the point you ignore most issues. It blows modern projects out of the water.

The best game out there. Been playing for years and intend to play for many more. Thank you Haxus.

This is no Shores of Hazeron. There's a steep learning curve that most will have zero interest in tackling. If you do tackle it, you will find it has eliminated pretty much everything fun from Shores of Hazeron. I'm sure if I wished to invest a ton of time, I could find ways to have fun and remain interested. The game gave me no desire to go beyone where I did. So, I let it sit to see if it made improvements. Instead, what I see is there has been no update since June of 2024 and the developer is silent. The game appears abandoned.

графон конечно из 90х, но игра отличная, строишь город, добываешь ресурсы, летишь в космос и добываешь ещё ресурсов, чтобы улучшить корабли. На луне нет воздуха и воды, так что колонию нужно снабжать воздухом и водой. Когда она была ММО, можно было строить империю и раздавать посты друзьям или даже пострелять во вражеский космический корабль или игрока от первого лица. Может когда-то добавят мультиплеер и снова можно будет.

Figured I'd finally leave a review for this [b]Do not buy this.[/b] If you've heard stories about the Shores of Hazeron MMO, this isn't it. I played that from 2011 until its shutdown, and I can confidently say this has almost none of the charm or fun from it. Far less friendly to play for no benefit. Almost every mechanic has been removed or replaced with something worse, for example: [list] [*]No multiplayer [*]No other empires to interact with [*]Intuitive tetris-grid inventory replaced with soulless tree [*]Intuitive floor-based building system replaced with pre-designed buildings [*]Removal of reasonable building limitations making cities a chore to organize and manage [*]Same no-constraint issue for spacecraft [*]No PvM or PvP challenge making most of the game's mechanics irrelevant, including military buildings, most items, most ship functions and all combat mechanics [*]No progression, no research system, your empire knows everything the instant you start [*]Difficulty removed to the point where the remaining mechanics are made irrelevant, for example: [olist] [*]Unconstructed airports being able to teleport infinite resources across the solar system instantly [*]Being able to take what you want from any building without consequence, trading and taxes now completely meaningless [*]Broker buildings teleporting resources to other systems with no risk, making cargo ships invalid as a concept [/olist] [*]Almost no changes to function as a singleplayer game, all old multiplayer features like galactic chat are still there [*]19 extra galaxies despite even the MMO at its peak having at most 200 players that couldn't use a single one, spreading everybody out for no good reason. They are still there, serving no purpose in Starship [*]Planetary deformation and building damage, which turned combat into "nuke planet from orbit, leave", making soldiers and most combat mechanics useless [*]The removal of pressurized roads and canopies/shells over HEV buildings, making every colony feel like an earth town [*]Being able to use one pre-designed mega-building to handle most of a city's functions, so instead of a city logically expanding like before and having residential areas, you just have 4 buildings [*]A building design shows up in the list for many building types if it fulfils requirements, so the design picker is flooded with unrelated designs (having factories and a football arena listed when placing a wharf) [*]Dev and some players prioritizing "AI Empires" over MP hosting, despite previous AI attempts (pirates) being barely functional, uninteresting, and not even close to a replacement for real players (even today you can expect to see 1 pirate spawn every 200 hours, and only the 2 weakest pirate empires can spawn, meaning they pose no challenge and don't do anything) [*]The big one, the new spacecraft and building designer: [olist] [*]Intuitive block-painter designer replaced with a full-blown 3D CAD software, but a bad one that's worse than what Blender was in 2005 and doesn't integrate with the game universe much. I always describe it as "A CAD software poorly strapped to a game" [*]The new designer has seen almost no improvement since 2017, and instead of filling parts of the ship interior space with modules to determine its functionality like before, you now just have magical volume sliders. 90% of ships are just empty space [*]Ships used to be interior-first, where you'd place interior rooms first and the exterior would naturally come from that, now you design the exterior shape and fill space inside as you want, with interior rooms serving the bare minimum purpose and having no relation to ship functionality, just magical abstract sliders that determine its function. This means a gigantic cruiser-class spacecraft that's 1km long can be fully featured with a single tiny untextured cube room [*]Because of the above exterior-first method, most buildings no longer have interiors [*]No consistent style, causing cities to be filled with completely mismatched buildings like a high-detail realistic refinery next to an untextured triangle [*]Extreme designer complexity, players have to manually setup collision, NPC paths, textures, etc. No game designer should ever require the player to do this [/olist] Tldr just feels like the game has gotten smaller and got less and less to do... Games need constraints, if you remove everything, it's boring. As a player said: "Sports need rules" I feel really bad posting this because I've waited years for things to improve, and the dev is a nice person... but I just can't recommend this in good faith and I don't see it meaningfully improving. A lot of these problems started during the MMO days, with the period from 2016 to 2020 having the game see 3 or 4 online players at most.