---Red---Tether-->

very much not our thing, but we just wanted to support the dev, so its fine :3

good

amazing game with unique action style

It's a shame I can't love this game. Don't get me wrong, I had fun playing this game. It's very original and different in a good way. It's a roguelike, but instead of guns, you have to take down fleets of enemies and boss enemies with a harpoon and its string. Being different to every other game makes it interesting and hard as heck. The music also rocks, and the ambiance is okay. You'll feel a lot of dejá vu if you've played other games by Sleeper Games (the dev, singular). Now, going back to the difficulty part. The dev has supported this game for a long time, and that means a healthy amount of balance patches. Having played this two and a half years after release, I do believe that the game may be seen as fair and balanced to the dev and many hardcore players. However, I can't see it the same way, and for that reason I'm missing out on a lot of this games' content. You see, this is no casual game, and neither did I approach it as a casual gamer. I played through and thoroughly enjoyed Hyperspace Dogfights, Sleeper Games' oldest and most popular game (according to Steam reviews). After a few playthroughs, I understood what I was getting into. I also tried to strategize, used my knowledge of roguelikes to try to come up with builds. I read item descriptions and ship bonuses to see what types of playstyle were expected of me, and tried to get good at them. However, today I unlocked my third ship and two more upgrades, and decided to give up. I was hoping to get better ships and upgrades, or at least some for different playstyles, but I don't think I can get there with the tools I've been given. From the moment you start to the point I've got, you've got the following options for moving: -Using the ships' engines (slow or very slow) -Reeling yourself towards your harpoon after harpooning an object Your ways for dealing damage are: -Tethering two objects and making them crash -Harpooning enemy ship attachments and reeling in as you move away -Crashing into enemies at high speeds, usually through reeling yourself into them -Many, many variations of the former, including using debris, missiles, mines and so on I bring this up for you to know, but also because these were the options I considered. You can choose your upgrades focusing on ship speed and just mash your enemies together, or use long-distance harpoon upgrades for the same thing. You can also upgrade your collision damage and reeling speed to ram into your enemies. You've got many valid playstyles, right? The problem is that just a few types of enemy ships counter any possible build. In the second world, "shark" ships become obnoxiously common, and are used to pad any encounter. Just throw in like 3 or 4 of these. Apart from that, elemental-type small ships (fire or corrosion), and asteroids with either melee attachments, or the much more broken asteroids with an assortment of attachments. All these ships use missiles (not hard to dodge, just keep moving, but they keep the pressure on you), miniguns (run), cannons (just dodge) and autocannons (dodge and pray). All of these are okay, but in combination they are just broken. A lot of these will shred you if you're still trying to move around without reeling yourself towards something, but doing so puts you in range of all the other ships and puts you in danger as well. Also, unless you are reeling while tether to an attachment, you can't deal damage. Your tool for dealing damage is also used for mobility. This would be if (a) shark ships and their attachments weren't bullet sponges, (b) autocannons, and to a lesser extent miniguns, were not way overpowered, especially if two shark ships aim at you, (c) your mobility tools were a bit better, including your tether not breaking from just staring at it (trying to pull an attachment while accelerating away from a ship feels very clunky and inconsistent, and sometimes the tether just breaks when it should just hold you in place, apparently when you start accelerating too soon after landing your harpoon). Anyway, I don't usually buy games, but after Hyperspace Dogfights, I really wanted to check this out. While I had fund, and I think a lot of the ideas here are cool, I just won't be able to even reach the final fight. Is that okay if I still had fun? I'd say yes, but still, it leaves a sour taste. On to Swirl W@tch now.

For this game being an "action" game, there are too many things that can go wrong which, after happening, leave you in sometimes unrecoverable situations. UI intentionally glitching to obfuscate information (vision, resources); missiles that randomly(?) launch themselves anywhere within a radius around you/where you will be; explosions bouncing you, messing with your movement in the already fairly difficult to learn (and continue using once learned) movement system.. I could list more. You are incredibly fragile in this game, just a single mistake can and will lose you a life. Imagine trying to sling around debris and ships to break LOS with whatever is targeting you, until you accidentally tether to a random missile heading your way, completely ruining your movement, and before you can break the tether and launch a new one to redirect your movement, you've already made too large of a mistake and you've lost a life. Of course, the answer is to just not get into those situations in the first place. ...unless you spend all of your focus and effort planning exactly how you want to take down the wave in front of you, how everything will interact, where you'll be forced to move after you get in and out and how to dodge everything, you're just going to get into these situations. Oh wait, you even thought of all of that too? Too bad, a mine will inevitably spawn directly in the path you wanted to take during a crucial moment, and you'll have to change directions because you cannot redirect the seeking mine before it is blown up by everything else in your face. There's so many layers of mechanics and systems that, eventually, things like that just feel bound to happen. Then you combine the natural chaos of the game with the difficult movement system, which notably requires other objects nearby for you to tether to and grapple off of, just for you to meet the speed requirements needed to dodge certain things, and you'll lose lives in frustrating ways. Unfortunately, I feel as if 80% of my lives are lost like this. I'm sure someone better at the game could point out genuine flaws in my gameplay and decision making that lead to some of these situations. Unfortunately, it's very unenjoyable to genuinely think I'm losing so often due to scenarios I feel I shouldn't need to attempt to foresee (due to their apparent randomness and chaoticness), and so I couldn't really care to improve. Also also, I still think even if I got significantly better at the game that I'd still run into these unreasonable scenarios, and that'll always be incredibly frustrating. Red Tether also has a weird identity that I've already indirectly brought up, but I'll re-elaborate on it specifically. The game can be very fast paced: statuses forcing action out of you, the variety of many weapons requiring elaborate movement, the movement system itself allowing for a lottt of slingshotting and weaving around enemies and debris, things tac jumping (teleporting essentially) all over, etc etc.. At the same time, there are a lot of systems that punish you for attempting to fly through everything, so it just feels weird, what does the game want out of me? There are enemies and threats that each shut down a specific type of defensive maneuver or some option that you have, and sometimes it'll feel like they're all in the same wave, and when that happens trying to make any kind of play feels not worth it?? idk. Do anything, get punished, outplay the punish, something you wouldn't (and shouldn't) have ever thought of instantly occurs and you're unable to escape because the game is intentionally clunky (for a lack of better words). This is all quite unfortunate because honestly, in a lot of ways the game is very brilliantly designed. There's so many interesting mechanics, interactions, and ideas, and they all lead to such sick, emergent situations that are so enjoyable to navigate. It's difficult to enjoy those great moments once the dissonance and unforeseeable nightmares occur.

2D Hardspace Shipbreaker on crack

So.. I recently picked this game up again... I thought I was going to be just as horrible as I was at the game the first time I played.. but now I'm better at it?? Starting to unlock more things and more equipment (Songbird techno is amazing). Anyways.. I love the design of this game and while the controls might be a bit difficult to keep track, it still has fun & time killing gameplay!

Not much beats flying in circles around the enemy while simultaneously crushing, burning, freezing, shocking, exploding, or otherwise destroying them with their own resources.

Gets difficult fast, but imo its really fun. It has a single fundamental game mechanic - the tether - and bases the rest of the game and balance off of it, but its a complex and fun mechanic that doesn't feel like a chore with a high skill ceiling.

Simple, great, lots of unlocks. Worth trying for a couple hours at the least, you'll KNOW if you don't like it.