If you play this, go in expecting the feel of a janky indie project made by people who love a classic game (Descent) and wanted to create their own with a bunch of new ideas. They “finished” the game but didn't fix all the problems, then the team broke up and “moved on to other things” according to one of their posts. Overall, there's a neat game here which 6DoF fans should try. Just don't expect to get every achievement legitimately.
On the positive side, they present a strongly realized world. This isn't what the insides of a computer look like, especially the rock and dirt tunnels, but most areas look good. I got the sense several times of a Reboot-like setting without humanoid avatars. The story starts with a virus infecting a computer and you are the gun-turret anti-virus program flying in zero-gravity to hunt the corruption. The larger idea is you are saving this computer after some hacker guy both created a virus and tried to stop it, all of which you find out from emails. There's also a lot of amusing spam email.
Health is essentially Halo-style shields; when you get hit, your shields must clear the viral infection (the red part) before they can regenerate. If you take a small hit, the shields come back quickly, while a bunch of big hits close together take a long time to recover and might get you killed, which is why you should use a green orb to start the regen immediately. Better yet, keep moving so you avoid those hits in the first place.
Weapons play with the usual FPS tropes, except for one important thing: they all share the same pool of auto-recharging ammo which works in an interesting way. Your ammo pool recharges when you stop firing and gets a big boost every time you destroy an enemy, but you can't fire for a moment if you drain the ammo pool completely. With enough aiming skill and trigger control, you could almost never stop firing, while the more you miss, the more time you spend empty.
Unfortunately, because your pistol ammo is also your rocket launcher ammo, the weapons had to be balanced. A full clip of well-placed pistol shots hit about as hard as any other weapon, with the main difference being they fire differently; the pistol shots are fast, the shotgun and minigun scatter, the rockets have a slight homing ability, and the grenades bounce. Rockets and rifle shots feel oddly weak, which might be why they were my least favorite.
Some weapons have special uses to give them extra depth, such as how the shotgun can create gravity wells, or the minigun can make explosions. Pulling enemies into a group can be useful if you time it right, though I rarely did. Once or twice in hard mode I needed to pull dumb allies out of combat so they wouldn't get turned against me. I don't know why rockets aren't the pushback weapon, and the rifle clearly needs longer range and a zoom function, but I used the weapons I liked and had a good time with them in the increasingly-tough combat.
Then there's a great RPG-like ability tree system where the “memory bits” gained from enemies and side paths allow you to choose upgrades for the ship. There's a lot of tactical options such as weapon changes and playstyle modifiers, and nothing is set so you can try new combinations whenever you want. You can play fast and accurate, slow and tanky, get stealthy, try ramming things and much more. There's even neat ultimates like summoning a minion or short invincibility.
My favorite weapon mod was easily the laser gun because the damage adds up fast, especially with ship mods to power up from scanning foes. The smoke grenade launcher is great at providing instant cover, the charging rifle finally feels fun, the spread-reduced shotgun and minigun are decent damage dealers, and the triple-homing missiles helped in a boss fight.
There's some good early boss fights that feel like duels, starting with a super-powered normal enemy with a big room to fly around in, then a (somewhat grueling) battle with an invisible enemy in the old Descent style. Later, a boss rush section has you take them on in more difficult rooms, yet by then you can modify your ship to meet the needs of each encounter.
But the final boss fights (honestly the whole tail end of the game) feel like they weren't well thought out; first there's a slog in the style of a MOBA where you're up against enemies that have always been invulnerable and nothing you learned earlier works, next there's a fight against the big virus which just kind of moves around a lot without any interesting behavior, and lastly there's a surprise boss which didn't feel meaningful or explained at all.
Continuing into the negatives for this game, the big one is that piloting feels a little awkward at first. This ship is a heavy armored tank compared to the nimble drones of other 6DoF games, though I did get used to it. Sometimes the auto-leveling feels good, sometimes too heavy-handed, and sometimes rotation doesn't work at all. I don't know whether the engine is homemade or just not a perfect match, but either way, the flight gameplay doesn't feel perfect.
A lot of ideas and items don't get a clear explanation, like why the term cycle gets used so much (it means ammo) and what the blue orbs do (they work like health orbs for ammo). I often felt like someone who understood computer terms would get more from the dialogue.
Finally there's the actual issues with this game. The controls might become stuck moving in a direction if you use keys to look, though switching to the mouse for aiming helped me. Level stats will say you missed an enemy no matter how hard you look, and some achievements can't be earned. There's also reports of memory leaks and crashes after playing too long.
But honestly, if you like 6DoF games, play this. It runs better than Descent 3, flies better than Descent 2, and serves as a nice fan tribute to Descent 1. Supposedly the mutiplayer still works, so maybe I'll return to this someday for the co-op.
