Hyperspace Dogfights

One of the best roguelikes I have ever played. The visuals are beautiful and the combat is fluid and satisfying.

To not distract the developer from making games, the positive review has been removed

[i]Hyperspace Dogfights[/i] might be a fun game, but is so mired by issues that I ended up refunding it. [olist] [*] It won’t run as anything but a bordered window. No fullscreen, no fullscreen windowed. The window does not even have a custom program icon, nor is affected by system color settings. Just a bright, white, and distracting bar atop the game at all times. [*] The scaling of text and UI elements is both arbitrary and inconsistent. At 4K resolution, the tutorial text is illegible without leaning in towards my monitor and squinting. Yet, the text related to gameplay is so large and blocky that it’s distracting. The UI elements during gameplay are too small to parse, yet those within the menus are enormous. While it is possible to scale some of these elements, doing so pushes parts of them offscreen and breaks some sections of the menu. [*] The menus are only navigable by using the mouse. But not the main menu, that can only be navigated by the keyboard and is brought up by pressing [b]Escape[/b]. Clicking on the menu icons does nothing. [*] Controller support is abysmal. An Xbox controller was not autodetected. After activating it manually, none of the buttons were bound I had to bind each and every one manually. The game does helpfully show an image of suggested bindings, provided you have not scaled the UI up too high to push some of it offscreen. There are no icons or proper names for buttons. Instead, they are cryptically referred to with terms like [b]-AxisPovX[/b] or [b]B7[/b] or [b]+AxisZ[/b] in both the menus and UI elements. During the tutorial, inputs at various points are sometimes referred using these names, or the keyboard inputs, or sometimes even both. By the end of the tutorial I was mashing all four face buttons to proceed because I couldn’t remember which one was [b]B0[/b], [b]B1[/b], [b]B2[/b], or [b]B3[/b] and different sections required different inputs. [*] The game has serious problems with visual hierarchy, color, and clutter. Elements in the background have stronger contrast and more visual detail than either the player or enemies. The clouds have a huge amount of contrast, and the sun behind them has even more. Sometimes, enormous, blocky text appears behind all that with such weight as to obscure everything else. Yet, text elements more important to gameplay—dodging, incoming fire, etc.—remain tiny no matter what the scaling, and with colors that blend into the background. The “pixel size” of the player, enemies, bullets, missiles, and various text elements are all different and inconsistent. The effect of all this is overwhelming visual noise, and not in a good way. I found it difficult to track the player amid all this and to parse incoming enemies and attacks. If you’ve studied art, graphic design, or even just remember opposing and complimentary colors from elementary school, [i]Hyperspace Dogfights[/i] will likely frustrate you to no end. [*] The game was dropping frames when the action got heated. Yes, I tried adjusting the “hitlag amount,” which briefly pauses the action each time the player’s bullet connects. This appears to be technical issue, but I did not spend any time diagnosing it. (8th gen i5 CPU, 16gb RAM, GTX 2070 Super) [*] This is more subjective, but the sound effects and music were pretty basic. And playing with headphones, I did not notice much stereo separation or definition for the actions onscreen. Much like the visual elements, it seemed like a whole lotta noise. [/olist]

A surprisingly great game that is nonetheless approximately as underrated as AI War II. Some upgrades are actively harmful, some are ludicrously strong, but you can choose not to nab an upgrade and you get enough upgrades in a given run that the balance works out. I try not to be nasty about other reviewers, but complaints about "frame-dropping" are almost certainly from those who didn't go into Settings and realize that the pauses are deliberate to help you in high-intensity situations, and can be switched off. That being said, there IS an awful-awful-awful green-on-black stage that is not at all accessibility friendly, and is hellish to navigate in general. Aside from that, though, I very much enjoy this game, making one of the only games in this genre I like at all. It isn't my usual jam.

Jets with swords.

It's a good time~

I am BAD at this but I enjoy it. Reminds me of Luftrausers by Vlambeer except you can reverse-thrust and the screen shakes a whole lot. EDIT: You can turn off screen shake and hit lag.

Fully an awesome game with loads of content, rewarding loop, the agility to nope your way out of many a situation. Don't expect great graphics, but do enjoy a dynamic environment of a lot of varied foes. Good Game!!

good