Masteroid

The game is a wonderful little gem. It's a small casual little space game that is exactly what it says on the proverbial tin. Great art style, relaxing gameplay, procedurally generated galaxy and missions. All around a nice little pick up and play space title for a reasonable price that I can definitely see myself jumping into whenever I want to just chill out for a bit.

Feels like Early Access. Gameplay is super shallow and samey despite grand notions of ship upgrades and reputations and procedural levels so no two plays are the same, etc. The levels are procedurally generated in that the sector names are made by combining 3 random words, and I guess the nebulae & planets in the background are procedural too maybe...? Either way, none of this has any bearing on gameplay so it's irrelevant. The asteroids are, well, asteroids. If a game had a field of grass where every blade was precedurally generated, would you notice? And more importantly, would it matter? That's basically what's going on here. The weapons are all pretty much the same just with bigger numbers. No drawbacks or benefits to any particular type, no strategic thought required. Costs more = better. The missions have about the same level of variety, very one dimensional. The UI feels unfinished, lacking information in places and generally being vague and unhelpful. On top of all that, there's several technical gremlins with the game. Zooming in literally just makes everything bigger, showing some hilariously blurry sprites...and you'll see that a lot because it resets the zoom every time you warp for some reason. The tutorial resets after closing the game down. Weapon targeting seems completely random, doesn't respond half the time and occasionally locks on to stuff that was flying nearby instead of where the cursor actually is. The loading screen tips refer to game mechanics that don't appear to be implemented yet. It's a shame, because the art style (ships and stations) have a cool dark pixel style. As a proper fleshed out game this could be something great, but I can't see the developer taking that route. As it stands it feels and plays like something that came out of a game jam weekend.

Full disclosure: I am a friend of the developer. That said, I have other friends that have made games that I don't find as enjoyable as Masteroid (sorry guys!) I played this game in its very early stages and gave lots of feedback and recommendations, because I wanted to see this grow into something great. This latest iteration, what you see on Steam, is way better than I could have imagined. The art style is fantastic. The music is soothing and chill. The game is relaxing and calming, while still offering a lot of fun combat missions. The names of sectors are charming and witty, with character. I get a kick out of being sent to weird places like Responsible Milk Psi or Repulsive Glove Beta to load cargo or attack enemy ships. Also, NORA is great. Heed her advice, and she won't steer you wrong. Overall, for the price, Masteroid provides far more replayability than you get with most games. I look forward to playing more and wish its developer great success. Well done!

I don't normally bother leaving reviews but as I gambled and bought this at release, I thought why not? I picked this up to kill an evening and it did exactly that and well. It's is priced just right for how much content is in it which for me is about £1 per hour of entertainment. I was a massive fan of Space Pirates and Zombies and while this game doesn't play quite the same it certainly feels inspired by it. I really like the art style, silhouetted ships/stations against colourful but not overpowering space, and while your original ship feels like its too small to see at first this gets better as you get bigger classes of ship. After about 2 hours (of 5 1/2 in my case) you will start to see the limitations of the game, 2 factions only, 6 star systems, no new ship unlocks from faction rank up after 8 (I think from what I can tell?) but honestly that's all fine when you consider the price and that the core game play is so so satisfying, put some headphones on, chill out and blow up some asteroids. I made it my goal to get the largest ship and outfit it with good enough weapons so that I could face off with any other ship and doing so meant I had "completed" the game in about 5 1/2 hours, if you then wanted to play through the other faction and try out the other ships/weapons, this could easily stretch to 10. The game is not without issue as others have mentioned, I will list below: [b] Resolution [/b] - 1920p only, while not an issue for me it's a surprising limitation. [b] Window not maximising [/b] - This cut off the lower display for me so I couldn't see system names, cargo capacity and energy usage. Fixed itself after a couple of restarts and worked flawlessly after that. [b] Suicidal Assassin targets? [/b] - My assassination targets sometimes flew away and either got themselves killed by radiation or some larger ships, a bug or was I just lucky? Similarly later Assassination targets were comically weak for the 10.5k bounty on their head, as in scout/schoomer class vs my 2nd to largest ship. --- The game seems like an excellent base to build off and I dearly hope the developer considers doing so, my wishlist would be this: [b] Improved controls [/b] - Make left click move and right click target things only, when my weapons improved I popped too many poor scout class ships by mistake :( [b] Mission tracking [/b] - This doesn't have to be anything big at all, the destination station could fit on the lower bar or better yet place a marker next to the station in the warp menu. Lots of times I forgot where I was going after just a bit of mining. [b] Numbers! [/b] - I'd like to actually see the hp of my ship, cargo space, energy next to the bars, especially cargo as I could never quite tell if I was full yet. further one of the most important factors to me when buying a new ship was how much energy [b] regen [/b] it has and as far as I can tell it isn't displayed. finally an option for damage numbers in combat to help judge weapons would be nice. [b] Autopilot [/b] - Nothing complex but I would like to be able to autopilot to targets (station, assassination) by clicking the HUD indicator arrows like buttons, a lot of time is spent travelling chasing ships and returning from runs especially as your ships get slower and bigger. [b] More stuff to find [/b] - Essentially I would like to see more out in the asteroid fields like random events, derelict ships not fully destroyed and maybe in need of rescue, pirates that are free to kill for no rep loss, lost cargo etc. These events could be made special by rewarding the player with a weapon of relevant power for the task. --- That's pretty much it and the developer should be proud of this, I studied game design for years and never made anything close to this good, I'd be damn proud. PS, a combat style that helped me punch above my weight was to go with the fastest (but still larger) ships you can afford and use rockets from the Tertius faction. Out run the enemy and fire from superior range with missiles! Usually I lost very little Hull HP.

Hmmmm. Loved the screenshots, really took me back to Asteroids in the 80's, I havent played this game long, and I do unfortunately find the game a bit lacking, Initially not even guidance given, who are friendly, who is an enemy, ie Who can I attack without losing rep. Would like to see further targets to head for as opposed to just the main docking station. Tutorial is lacking, more explanation would come in handy in finding and using warp and missions, also with equipment and ships. I've enjoyed the short time I played, but it got stale quickly. But dont let that put you off, there may be more variety later on, I havent perhaps given it enough time. A great idea, and while I said I wouldn't recommend, I would with a few improvements, expansion of ideas and an improved tutorial etc. A little more speed initially would be good too and more ships to attack without penalties.

I like this genre of game a lot. I played this for about 8 hours. Not bad for a $5 purchase. I don't regret buying it. It only requires the mouse to play, which makes it an attractive choice for gamers with motor-control issues. That said... There are much better examples of this genre. If you're considering buying this, and haven't already played Endless Sky, stop now and go play that game. It's completely free (not F2P), and quite good. This game has janky controls. Right click to move, left click to target. Simple. But targeting often fails unpredictably. If you accidentally double-left click while targeting your ship comes to a stop... this is stupid, and all too common. You can't target (left click) if you're actively guiding the ship (holding right-click). You stop shooting if your cursor moves over part of the HUD. Weapon balance is poor. Weapons only get better (range, dps, efficiency) as they get more expensive so there is absolutely no trade-off. The best ship has six turrets, but you only need 3 filled with the best weapons to have the highest end-game DPS and range. This is disappointing, to say the least, but it would be easy to fix... just tweaking the numbers to improve the efficiency of cheaper weapons and the DPS of shorter-range weapons would make a huge difference in the viability of varying builds. But harder to fix is the complete lack of different weapon types. There is only one type of weapon with tweaked numbers: projectile with auto-leading. No manual-aim weapons, no dumbfire or seeking missiles, no weapons locked to the ships orientation (forward firing), no beam weapons, no mining weapons that trade mining efficiency for poorer ship damage. All the variety usually seen in this genre is missing, and it eliminates most of the fun of ranking up with the two factions to unlock new weapons and trying out different ship builds. The missions are very simplistic... Transport (go to a sector and dock, low profit courier), Supply (deliver ore, which essentially just improves the profit of mining), Assassinate (go to sector and follow mission arrow to kill target ship), and Rampage (not really called that, but it's just kill X ships of opposing faction). I don't mind this much , but it is a little repetitive. Mining could be better. Blow up asteroids, fly near to gather ore. Ore is just sold, you can't use it for anything else, and there is only one type of ore. Asteroids blow up into smaller bits, and regardless of the bit-size, each destruction usually results in 1-3 bits, with occasional bursts of 5-15 ore instead. There is no skill or decision-making in mining... any bit (small or large) has the same drop rate, and all asteroids are the same. There is no regional or local variation... all areas are the same profitability. This is a fine first attempt at a game. It would get good marks as a student project. But it's probably not worth your money yet. That said, the developer is actively engaging with the community and improving things (like the double-left click halting the ship), so this may change.

I am really enjoying this game so far, the music and sound effects are great, along with the visuals. Its a little grindy at first but that makes it more enjoyable to play, I experienced a bit of a learning curve at the beginning but I caught on pretty quickly. Controls are good as well all you really need is a mouse. I have only encountered one bug which was one of the ships would not leave the dock and it rendered the one side useless but that was fixed via teleporting, also docks seem to have delay i'm not sure if that's to do with positioning or what but its a little frustrating when you're being attacked and trying to get a repair going. (I see you've updated that now!) Other than that I say the game is pretty cool and I feel like my money was invested in a good cause. Do you have plans to update later? I was thinking it would be cool to get your own little convoy going and what not :)

Alors M... Qu'en dire pour ce petit jeu payé 3€. Et bien ... que le prix vaux le jeu. On est donc perdu en plein espace, sans aucun but particulier autre que celui de monter notre réputation avec les deux factions qui s'opposent dans le galaxie. Le jeu est simple, click droit on bouge, click gauche on lock une cible qui est auto attaquée jusqu'à destruction. Donc au début on farm les asteroides car c'est ce qui rapporte de l'argent et de l'exp tranquillou sans se prendre la tête, on monte l'affection, puis on débloque un nouveau vaisseau et armes ... etc jusqu'à monter niveau 10. A savoir, passé le niveau 6 il n'y a plus ni nouveau vaisseau, ni nouvelles armes. Les maps sont globalement toutes les mêmes. il n'y a pas vraiment de paysages qui changent réellement. Les station de trade sont CHIANNNNNNTE au possible, le devs à mit un cercle vert pour dire que c'est là qu'il faut se poser, la toute première fois il m'a fallut cinq minutes pour comprendre que si t'es pas aligné au pixel près, tu te dock pas. Et ça sert à rien de click gauche hein, tu te pose, t'attend que ton vaisseau tourne tout seul dans un sens ou l'autre ... et tu recommences, jusqu'à ce que tu réussisses. Complètement stupide. Un système simple, bordel. Tu rentres dans le rond vert, boum, t'es dock. Point barre. Tu peux passer plusieurs minutes à tourner ton vaisseau dans tout les sens pour y arriver. Parce que bon le truc marrant, c'est que pendant que t'essaie de dock et que tu n'y arrives pas, d'autres vaisseaux ce dock, et des fois, ces autres vaisseaux dockés se font attaquer par d'autres vaisseaux, sauf que toi, comme t'es entrain d'essayer de te dock depuis cinq minutes et que tu n'y arrives pas ... tu prends les coups à la place du vaisseau qui se fait canardé. Super cool ça, bien pensé, génial, bravo le dev. Donc quand t'as niqué la moitié de ta barre de vie juste à essayer de dock, et donc que tu click sur l'autre vaisseau qui fait le con autour de toi, t'as tes canons qui tire dans tout les sens pour essayer de le dégommer. Ah, truc drole, si un de tes tirs effleure la carlingue d'un autre vaisseau, il passe direct ennemi. Je vous laisse imaginer maintenant l'orgie de tirs dans tout les sens de tout les vaisseaus dans la zone. Tout ça parce que le dev à pas mit un putain de dock auto. GRRRRR A part ça ... on tourne vite en rond, les amélios ne touche que le vaisseau en lui même et les armes, point barre, rien d'autre. Il n'y a pas de mode pacifiste où on puisse empêcher notre vaisseau d'attaquer les autres. Il suffit que vous attaquiez un asteroide et qu'un vaisseau ennemi passe évidemment dans votre ligne de feu pour qu'un combat se déclenche direct. Par contre quand eux vous touche il n'y a même pas un petit mot d'excuse ou un constat de fait afin que l'assurance rembourse les frais de carrosserie, non, que dalle hein. Donc bon ... dans l'état, mouais ... 2€, 2h de jeu ... mouais ... bon allez, ça les vaux. Mais tout juste.

This game is what it claims to be on the tin. It is relaxing, casual, and in addition, addicting in ways you might not expect. If you love indie games, and you especially love the genre of game this game is (Windward comes to mind), this is worth a buy. Sale or no sale, Masteroid is affordable. I assure you, you will get your money's worth. If it jives with you, you will get more than what you paid out of it. Here are some things I really like about the game: - Progression: the game's progression is simple, immersive, and elegant. Indeed, the game itself is all of these things, so I will try not to repeat that phrase ad nauseum. - Art: I have literally never seen a space game depict space stations in a cooler way. Honestly, the complexity of the background set pieces is stunning for these stations. My one complaint is that there are only six of them per save game, and that they all have the same functionality (although prices and factions vary between them). They look convincingly real, and immediately sold me on the science fiction aspect of the game. Each one is a veritable city in space, with artificial gravity rings, solar panels, and some even having clever details like shipyards for you to notice. I saw an Aetherkind station with a Tertius ship in its shipyard (the Broadsword) leaving me to speculate about how it got there and whether Aetherkind are deconstructing or salvaging captured ships. - Music: Calm, relaxing, uninvasive. In games like this, I normally mute the game's sound track because it usually isn't worth keeping on over what I could be listening to; I had no compulsion to do so here. - Ships: If you see it, you can fly it. However, ships are pretty complex, as are the weapon upgrades, leaving you to weigh a variety of pros and cons. I immediately noticed in my scout class ships that I could easily out-maneuver much larger vessels. As a result, I am about to start a run where I select a favorite scout-class ship from one of the factions (I'm still deliberating) and only upgrade its weapon in order to do bounty and assassination missions for the faction I bought it from. Ideally, I should buy a long-range weapon whose energy I can manage in the small ship, and then dog-fight the much larger ships and avoid their fire while pounding them continually. It should make for a very challenging, fun play-through. However, there are a lot of incentives to upgrade your ship from scout to cruiser as well, so a lot of it comes down to how you want to play. Here are the things I liked less about the game: - Warping: I felt like the loading screen for warping could be substituted with an animation that hides loading screen and sells the player a little more on the science fiction feel of the game by showing the warp happen. Moreover, when you hit the warp button, the game pauses. This allows you to get into some really sticky situations and then warp out without consequence. From reading the developer's comments to other reviews, it sounds like a cost for warping might be implemented, which I think would go a long way to prevent warping in this way to be a "get out of jail free" card every time. - Content: Saying that there isn't enough content sounds bad, and in this case simply isn't true. I have easily gotten my money's worth out of the content of the game as it stands, so the game has enough. HOWEVER, I am a gamer, and I always want more of a good thing. This means that you probably will too. While the game as it stands has enough content for the price of the game (easily), I just want more. It is fun, so it feels disappointing to reach the end of progression and feel like I'm done before I want to be -- somewhat like finishing a good book. I wonder if the developer could add a kind of endgame: content that favors high rankings in the factions and having possession of destroyers and cruisers to fight or engage certain areas on the map (which, incidentally, could have military installations as beautifully crafted as the space stations, but with more risk, danger, and reward involved in interacting with them. In addition, and in a suggestion that is likely far trickier and difficult to implement, it would be very interesting for there to be various world states that the player can interact with and change. For instance, a station could look damaged in the game, but through enough ore supply missions, could slowly be repaired. Moreover, if you do enough bounty hunting of enemy ships in a particular sector, that station begins to fall into disrepair. Also, maybe battleships/dreadnoughts could be added (unless they already exist and I just haven't gotten to that rank?). Finally, while the game's name is Masteroid, it might be interesting to be able to get resources from objects that look like salvaged pieces of stations (I just really love the station art, okay) instead of space-rocks.

This is a really nice baseline for a game, and I'd love to see it expanded upon. More factions and zones with interconnected relationships, etc. Main cons are that currently it's a bit repetitive with not much variation in site, and there are major resolution errors. full screen doesn't work correctly, and the only resolution supported is 1920x1080. For me this isn't suitable to the entire bottom info bar is blocked off.