SpaceBourne 2

This game has tremendous scope but it's a constant struggle to do basic things. Missions have obscure requirements. Game mechanics aren't explained anywhere, or don't do what the explanations would suggest. All the online guides are for previous versions of the game and no longer apply. The Discord channel is mostly silent and when you do get a response a day later it doesn't actually help. As an example, I bought a new ship. It has fewer weapons than the older one, but comes with drones. I bought drones. In the 'combat drones' section of the ship configuration I put them into 'drone decks' 1-3. First time I enter combat, they wont launch. The 'error' message is obscure: they're in cooldown. For 20 minutes with no change. Online guides: missing. In-game guides and tutorials: zero mention of drones. Discord: no answer. The game is a mess. Tons of great ideas, lots of nice features, plenty to explore, enticing promises. I want to play. I'm putting hours into it. It's just that many of those hours are wasted trying to work out something quite basic: How do you actually play this game.

I really wanted to like and recommend this game. On paper, this game is awesome, with lots of cool ideas, a strong overall vision, and a general lack of similar games like it. A safe haven for someone bored with Elite Dangerous who doesn’t want to finance the church of Chris Roberts. Only on paper. I had this game on my wishlist for many years, waiting for it to come out of early access. When the devs finally decided to announce 1.0 and leave early access, I bought the game instantly. Well… it shouldn’t have come out of early access. It’s still a buggy mess that lacks optimization, general polish, and core mechanics overhauls, etc. Since I started playing this game, it: 1. Crashed like 5-6 times during warping (the devs fixed it in patches, but honestly it shouldn't happen in 1.0. This game was cooking in early access for many years, this is basic stuff that should be checked before announcing the game is ready). 2. My faction path choice was messed up. The stats / bonuses under chaos, order and justice were messed up (justice and chaos were switched) 3. The economy is completely broken. You start a faction, recruit few guys and suddenly have huge expenses compared to what you earn. 4. I built capital station (which was basically a waiting game) - The capital was invisible. I couldn't progress until I jump to the other system, restarted game and came back (bonus points for also being stuck in the black screen inside a planet). 5. Capturing systems feels like mobile game. You have 5 actions that you can do to increase your dominance points in the system. You click all of them, wait 5 minutes, if it's not enough you just click them again and wait 5 minutes again. Boom You can capture system now. 6. Dungeons have much lower FPS. One time I went from 120 FPS in a spaceship to 20 FPS fighting a boss in a dungeon. 7. If you know elite dangerous on foot combat, the on foot combat in this game is as bad, just differently. At least the enemies aren’t bullet sponges, but they can spawn all around you and just run at you shooting. That’s the extent of their actions and intelligence. 8. There are more problems, but this post is long enough. I think you get my point. I know this game is from small studio and it's not expensive, but I just cannot recommend it. This game is NOT ready. While I appreciate developers are updating the game almost daily with new bug fixes, performance improvements and general stability fixes, it's too little too late. It's not enough for full release. Additionally, they published a roadmap with even more features being added or existing features completely changed. While some may welcome this, for me it's a clear signal that developers of this game does not want to fix and polish what is already done, they will just pile up more and more buggy features and mechanics on top of already buggy game. What a shame. For me this game wins the "Disappointment Award 2025"

I would really, really like to give this a good review. As you can see from my playtime I've personally extracted plenty of enjoyment from it over the years of Early Access. But unfortunately I cannot in good conscience recommend it to others when it's left EA in this state. While it's more stable and complete than it used to be, there are far too many "you have some balls to call this a finished game" issues, like huge portions of the faction UI being nonfunctional mockups. For example, you're presented with four different orders you can give to squads under your command, but only the default Freelancer (well.. 'Freelencer') is actually possible, and the 'give orders' button does nothing at all. Loyalty values and the Justice/Order/Chaos alignment for each soldier do nothing. Having a negative faction income doesn't actually affect anything either... which is good, since you have an army to feed long before you can build or capture anything that generates money. While the explorers guild actually does something now, scanning only ever reveals one identical dungeon. Some gear bonuses work, others aren't actually applied. It's unfortunately clear this game was too ambitious for its scale of development and made a lot of promises it couldn't keep. At this point, I would prefer they admit they had to scale back and clean up the remnants of mechanics that didn't pan out.

Let it be on the record that I love a really ambitious game. And, by any standard, this game is really ambitious! That there's basically only one developer makes this insane. But I'm not gonna lie, this game is not for everyone. It's rough in places, mostly voice and consistent UX. The game does take pains to introduce you to all the systems through its campaign, which brings in each new piece one at a time as a form of extremely extended tutorial, which is to its enormous credit. Because, frankly, there's a lot, any one of which would make a fine game in its own right: To date, I've engaged in infantry combat, space-fighter combat, space exploration, space warfare with 50 fighters at a time. There might be capital ships, there is very likely to be largescale infantry combat, and the game leans on the notion of eventually doing galactic conquest and building up my own economy. There's atmospheric flight, procedural "dungeons", endemic wildlife, sprawling cities. But if you take pause and consider all of these things and how few developers there were, you might wonder if any cracks are showing. There are a lot. And, bluntly, if I went through the various issues I've found so far, I might run out of space. I'm still playing this and I don't want to focus on the negatives, but I do need to bring up a few that got me. 1: If you care about the plot, you'd need to have played the original game I think. The game brings up all these plot points early on which don't make any sense whatsoever. Well, it soon doesn't matter. 2: The voice acting is... spurious. One of the NPCs is literally voiced with text-to-speech. Your space general fellow (the middle-of-the-road guy) has two radically different voices, one a lantern-jawed gruff-as-hell fella, the other the cowboyest cowboy that ever wrangled a space-steer this side of the Rio Space Grande. A lot of flavour audio feels submitted by devoted fans, and I hope that's the correct interpretation. Along that same vein, while you can play as a male or female character, what plot lines there are were voiced only by the male. I don't know if later lines were voiced at all or are simply mute, but still. My "commander's child" is a lady and she whips so much ass that it IS funny. 3: So much of this winds up being really generic. I mean, no surprise, there's so much procedural generation. 4: [i]Levels[/i]. Your character has levels in infantry and space combat. Equipment and ship upgrades also have levels, and you can't equip stuff above your level. Your enemies also have levels which determine how effective they are. Go into a combat against some space pirates too much above your level and you'll get wrecked, despite having gear that just wiped out a major army. (Why the pirates don't wipe the army out themselves, I can't say. [i]Reasons.[/i]). Levels sort of make sense in the context of a "journey of the hero" in a fantasy setting, as they represent growing skill and endurance. But they're also, in my arrogant opinion, a bit of a crutch for game design and nothing wrecks a sense of immersion than showing up to a new batch of pirates, looking the same as the old batch, and getting wrecked because of "levels". Are levels that different than skills? YES. This game is enormously level-based and dispenses with them for story missions anyway, so how necessary are they, really? I get some people get their endorphin kicks out of number-get-bigger but it feels like stretching out a good meatball with a lot of filler. Yeah, you have more meatballs, but mine are way better. On the whole, this game has a lot for you to do, a lot of little pools you can dip your toes into. Much like Elite Dangerous, this game is extremely wide, wide as the ocean itself. Also like Elite Dangerous, it's not very deep. But if you're not put off by that, want a game that gives you the fantasy of conquering a galaxy in a rather hands-on sort of way, and really need to get your not-too-far-future scifi on, you could easily do a lot worse. It's a decent xmas present to yourself. Okay, also, if you're down here, you're my kind of person. You read things! It's kind of rare, you know. So I just thought I'd mention I've got a curator and I stream stuff, both of which are linked in my profile. I hate self-promotion with the blazing itch of an STD, but you know, if I don't do any at all, eh. You know. So you'd do be a bit of a solid if you looked.

Loved this game for a good while, poured some decent time into it. Until i had 5 systems, 3 production buildings, my capital building has 3 floors and nearly maxed upgraded. I couldn't get enough. Until raids on my bases started happening, 3 at once. 2 of the 3 raids were level 27(if you know about raids its about 40-60 enemy ships) there isn't enough people or having enough ships to go around. the ONLY faction i was at war with was the story driven one, who level is SUPOSED to be level 5-15 so i don't know why these raids on my systems are such higher level than i am(I'm only 23 and my pilots are level 25) i could not do anything, i lost my capital building, my mine and my tech building. I quit and haven't played in about a week and idk if I'm ever coming back. level scaling against your systems is the stupidest thing i could have possibly seen in any space game. the systems I'm in were unclaimed and those systems weren't over 20 i lost 10s of hours of game play and it breaks my heart

I have been around a game or two. From plugging in my first Atari and jamming on Asteroids for hours, to watching massive franchises grow from diamonds in the rough, I like to think I’ve seen a lot. I love big titles like Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, and No Man’s Sky. I also root for indie games, especially the ambitious “one developer” projects. I wanted SpaceBourne 2 to be a win, because the idea has real potential. That said, in its current state, this game is not playable. The interface is not even remotely intuitive. There are buttons all over the HUD that you can’t interact with unless you press H first. I have seen games do this, but the flow here is painful. Clicking a cargo button, then hunting for a tiny text menu below it, then clicking through multiple sub-options just to loot made me stop looting entirely. The on-screen slots at the bottom look like they are meant for consumables or skills, but it took far too long to figure out how to put anything there. The menus are overloaded and inconsistent. I spent more time reading, guessing, and Googling basic actions than actually playing the game. The voice acting is rough. Some lines are fine, but several performances are so over-the-top or unsettling that I ended up turning voices off entirely. The story is worse. This feels like a first draft that never got a rewrite. It constantly pulls you out of the experience. If the writing stays like this, it will actively hold the game back. Strong gameplay can survive a weak story. This story is not just weak, it is intrusive. Space combat feels unpolished. There is little to no damping, and the flight control is twitchy and erratic. Small mouse movements can spin the ship far too easily, which makes tracking targets feel sloppy instead of skill-based. If the goal is an atmospheric-style dogfight model, it needs tighter tuning. Ground combat is the most playable part. Aiming and firing feels passable, and it is the one area where I felt like I could just play. That said, I also did not feel much danger early on. Planet landing feels like a separate feature bolted on. It feels secondary and underdeveloped. The “land on a freighter in atmosphere and jetpack around it” moments broke immersion more than they added to it. The NPC dialogue interface is a miss. The option layout and the fast-forward controls feel unintuitive and frustrating. The moment I hit the “media NPC” segment and realized I had to sit through more of the dialogue and UI, I closed the game. Bottom line: the concept has potential, but the interface and presentation make it exhausting to play. I may revisit in a year or two if the UI, writing, and overall polish improve substantially, but I cannot recommend it in its current state.

An extremely ambitious project to put it mildly. Users report alot of bugs, 5 hours in I haven't encountered anything game-breaking. What may put players off is the level of polish - a basic thing like font choice, I kinda absolutely hate it. The localization is dodgy -spelling errors and syntax disasters are everywhere. But here's the main point that overrides all the above and just about any other gripe: It's fun. You don't need graphs on spreadsheets and dedicate your gaming time doing math like the X-series, you don't need to buy ships due to boring as balls gameplay like Elite's vast nothingness couched in technical complications. Everything is intuitive and feels 'organic' for a lack of a better description. You can easily get in it, without studying the wiki for 4 months. It's obvious the dev is passionate about this game and I would gladly support any additional content released for this game.

I really want to like this game, but it's plagued by bugs - not just simple ones, game breaking. My most recent attempt to play though this. Couldn't jump from the first mission giver. Couldn't engage boost to jump. The moment I locked on to the jump point controls locked up. Had to eject from the ship to regain control, but trying again had the same effect. Time before, during a fleet battle to control a station, couldn't find enough enemies to "win" the battle. Saved and reloaded, it worked, though then couldn't progress through the same mission due to NPC's not recognizing where I was. No amount of reloading fixed this issue.

TWENTY NINE PILOTS. Name should be this. Because 29% of the players, unlocked the first achievement. Then next 3-4 achievements are similar, then falls down to %12 because UI problems still continue. BECAUSE UI UX in this game is unintuitive. HOW CAN A DEVELOPER NOT CHECK THIS, YOU MADE A GAME AND ONLY %29 OF PEOPLE GOT THE ACHIEVEMENT THAT COULD BE GOT ON 3 MINUTES BECAUSE OF UNINTUITIVE MAP AND CLICKING CHOICES. Maybe a good game hidden under a really bad interaction system. I couldnt play more for now.