Lightspeed Frontier

Im starting to get into to LF and can see huge potential right away. Initially I had some minor (see orig review at bottom)problems that were quickly resolved and am enjoying the newer version much more. Im glad to support the development of this type of game, especially since there aren't many decent ones available for Mac users. Sometimes there are strange graphical glitches that seem to occure after playing for a little while (20-30 minutes appx) and making a few jumos to other sectors. Its hard to explain, but if I save and quit, then re-open the game all is well. It doesnt always happen, in fact much less now than previous game versions. I beleive this indicates that the development is continually impproving the quality and stability of this game. Mostly I play for the ship building aspects and much less for combat. Ship building is great for the most part and quite fun. The new modules and weapons might be cool? I cant seem to find any yet. Searching for floating abandoned ships to scavange has yet to reveal and new fruit but im sure ill stumble upon them as I continue to explore. Exploring is much of the fun so im not really complaining. Though it would be nice if stations sold the parts I want even though I havent yet been lucky enough to find them. Combat however is a real low point. Attacking ships regardless of size are far too nimble and exceedingly proficient at staying in my blind spots. This makes for a very dizzying battle. Even locked on, (with incredibly weak missle batteries that do almost no damage) you still end up in a desperate battle of securing even a brief view of your attacker. More often than not I just leave them or jump away. Its just not worth the effort of trying to get any decent battle position, which takes a ton of circling around and around and around and around....ugh. Its like trying to aim at a hummingbird on speed SLOW DOWN DAMN IT! lol. Have a look at Rebel Galaxy for how ship to ship combat should be done. Anyway, terrible ship to ship combat aside, this game is always getting better and I do not regret the purchase. Cant wait for a playable combat system and all the new additions. OLD REVIEW - No longer applies to current version. My only issue so far is that my MBPro uses a touch pad for a mouse. 1 touch pad press = left MB click and 2 finger touch pad press = right click and everything else is gesture based such as scrolling by light touches etc. My point is that in this game the "Target Lock" is seemingly locked to MMB with no controls or binding reassigning where this MMB action is done? I could be mistaken but cannot seem to bind the MMB to another key or anything? Thus making combat extremely painful. Anyway aside from that early and likely rookie mistake (any reply with solutions welcome) I find this game to be heading in the right direction.

The game just keeps getting better.

Build your own ship, build a base, mine (or fight) for resources and make yourself rich. Explore space and have fun... Just watch out for the black holes.

Sieht so aus als ob das Spiel in einem rudimentären Zustand aufgegeben wurde. Schade um die schönen Ansätze darin. Tja, Geld regiert die Welt.

Terra Tech. In space. Will update when I play more but it looks enjoyable enough so far.

In it's current state it's painful to play. Everything rams you, knocking off your guns and blocks though most of the guns are useless in a circle strafe dog fight because only lasers (much later in game) and machine gun (starting wep) are the only 2 weps with projectile speed fast enough to strafe-aim with. If you don't strafe you get rammed, repeat. The ship building portion is kind of ok but Avorion is miles ahead. You'll ram ship parts an destroy them if your cargo bay is full because the pickup range is set too near, needs to be extended. The hover over tooltips could use less flavor text an more stats. The stats menu can use some polish with additional stats like power usage vs power gen, etc. Plenty of Bugs, glitches, not game breaking but pretty annoying, a reload save usually fixes. The last update was 5 months ago ... Spend the extra 2$ an get Avorion. Maybe one day this will be enjoyable but as it stands, it needs more work.

An absolute no-brainer. This game promises a lot and delivers nothing. Exploring, mining, missions...forget about it. You will build a ship and as soom as you move away from your starting point, some bad guys spawn out of nowhere and blast you to smithereens. You build a new ship and so on... You may try to escape to hyperspace but every time you enter normal space or warp to another sector, it´s "hostiles near" and being destroyed again. After playing for 2h I´m completely fed up with this nonsense. It´s a pity because the game is somewhat charming. I like the graphics and the soundtrack is weird. Flamenco and B-picture horror-flick music in a sci-fi-setting...that´s pretty cool. The sound effects are funny, too...like good ol´space-invader. This charming piece of trash would be okay for 3 Euro, for 15 it´s outrageously overprized. But it´s early access after all, there´s still hope.

(édition été 2020 : toujours rien, à part un dév qui passe pour dire que les ventes sont mauvaises et que du coup, ça ne les motive pas des masses. Ils voudraient bien publier une dernière mise à jour et sortir de l’accès anticipé. Du coup ça confirme que l’équipe est à côté de la plaque : ils sortent un jeu incomplet, bien plus tard ils disent que c’est un projet secondaire, ils sont étudiants, blabla, et encore plus tard (deux ans je crois), ils s’étonnent que les ventes soient mauvaises.) Pas vraiment un mauvais jeu en soi, mais je ne peux pas recommander son achat, pour cette raison en particulier : """Yeah we're aware that there hasn't been an update for a long while now. At first it was a sort of perfect storm of distractions that turned into a motivationless summer. Now most of us are busy with school and studies (and other things) so progress still isn't up to standard but we'll get there eventually. """ https://steamcommunity.com/app/548650/discussions/0/2656452469259081449/ Les développeurs n'ont "pas vraiment le temps de développer le jeu" car après un été démotivé, ils sont maintenant occupés avec leurs études. Pour un projet gratuit, éventuellement, j'accepte cette excuse. Pour un produit commercialisé et vendu via Steam, non.

putting this in Recommended as the game is functional with only a few very minor issue and the main gameplay loop is kinda fun with finding abandoned ships and fighting enemy ships to add parts onto your own ship,with enemies becoming more difficult as you get closer to the galaxy. NOW here's the kicker(bad part) I do not recommend buying at full price as the last few communications from the devs were very flaky, mainly them admitting that the development of the game is not their primary focus at the moment and that it is unknown when they will continue the furthered development the game to then move out of early access and that was said in 2021. I myself now consider this game as a dead game and at this point and time is not receiving updates.

[h1]Update 29.12.2019[/h1] The game hasn't gotten any major updates in a long time and it starts to feel like another abandonware, therefore review changed from positive to negative. For a little bit more you can get Avorion, that has a lot more polished features and considerably more content and very open to modding compared to this. [h1]Graphics[/h1] Mediocre and worse than some games 16 years ago. Not sure if they are placeholder or meant to be mobile friendly. [h1]Tutorial[/h1] It's actually nice to see an early access game to have a tutorial, that explains the basic mechanics enough so that it can get you started, however due to the mechanic of the game in relying of destroying cores, you have to armor it very well and preferably have more than one core, because AI ships drill straight through till they destroy all of your cores. They don't aim particularly at your other systems (fuel, engines, weapons etc). [h1]Radar and scanning capabilities[/h1] The only good use for the radar is that it shows blocks, that are left behind when you destroy an enemy and you can scoop them up using it as a guide on where to fly. It doesn't scale geometrically thus making it useless to detect ships very far away and enemies show up as red [ ] brackets in large distances away from the ship outside of the radar but in the main playfield. [h1]Weapon variety[/h1] Weapon selection is very limited (I'm not sure if it gets bigger if you progress further in the game and travel deeper into the galaxy). Some act as fixed, some gimbaled and some are turrets. Some can't penetrate shields, others can so even though you have lots and lots of shields, you might still be very vulnerable against certain enemies, that will have those few weapons, that do penetrate the shields. [h1]Shield and power management[/h1] Shields in the game are kinda meh. There is no clear information on how much shields you have in total, what's the charge rate for them, the penetration values against weapons, that can pass through them etc. Also you seem to have a functionality in the game to turn on/off shields and also turn on/off power generation. Based on the fact, that it's not that difficult to get enough power generation to support all your weapons and shields, there is really no need for both of these options at all and I didn't even bother to "manage power". [h1]Mining[/h1] Mining isn't anything fancy in this game, you just shoot them with any of your weapons and bunch of ore blocks pop out and you can collect them in your cargo containers, nothing special. [h1]Factions[/h1] Even if the description of the game mentions, that there are different corporations, that you can do missions fore, there is no real benefit of doing them, since it doesn't affect in any way how hostiles ships are spawned in the system. Game needs factions - pirates, neutral, traders, haulers, miners etc. There needs to be some option to interact with other ships, hail them with options like threatening traders/miners to drop their cargo, bribing hostiles to make them go away.