SpaceBourne 2

What can I say—once again a game where I wish there were a neutral rating option. The game doesn’t deserve a negative rating, but it also doesn’t deserve a positive one. So I’m left with no choice but to rate it negatively. First, the positives: * A great sandbox with plenty of missions and things to do * Your own faction with your own generals, NCOs, and soldiers * A small task force you can call in for support, both in space combat and on the ground * Space and ground combat * Lots of modules, systems, weapons, consumables, etc. * Later on: your own base, faction, mothership, etc. * Various ships with different use cases Overall, there are many positive aspects to the game, but unfortunately also many negative ones :( * Ships don’t really have distinct sizes. You don’t get the feeling of starting with a fighter and then progressing to a corvette, frigate, destroyer, cruiser, battleship, etc. (there is a mothership, though). I would like ship scaling similar to X4—from very small to very large. * Ships often differ only in the number of weapon slots and perks * The AI in space combat is a disaster. Enemies often form cluster piles (multiple ships stacked into each other) * Basically, you just fly in circles because AI ships get far too close to your ship. About 90% of the time you’re busy flying tight circles trying to get enemies into your sights * In missions like “Fly there and destroy all enemy ships,” the enemies spawn right next to you when you reach the target area. That means as soon as you arrive, the circling starts immediately * Your own squadron, which you can call in for support, deals 100x more damage than you do. Essentially, I don’t even need to fight—I just let my fighter wing handle everything. It takes me about a minute to bring an enemy ship’s shields down, while a single one of my fighters does far more damage per shot—even though the pilots are the same level as me * Flares for missile defense are basically just a button you press. It doesn’t matter when or where—once you press it, the missile will always miss * Personal preference: I don’t like that you have to use one type of weapon to break shields (because it only deals shield damage), then switch to another weapon group that only damages the hull. You also can’t activate both weapon groups at the same time. This makes combat unnecessarily tedious, constantly switching between weapon groups—very annoying * Escape pods from enemy pilots can be collected as prisoners (if you bought and equipped the proper equipment), but they are not shown on radar (there isn’t one) or in the HUD. So you only find them by manually looking around or by chance * The soldiers/pilots in your faction level up far too quickly. If I assign one of them to my personal squadron, they surpass my level after just a few kills * The health display of pilots in my squadron is bugged. They show zero shields and zero hull but never die. Ever. They simply cannot be destroyed * The main story is interesting, but large parts of it feel like “jump here, talk to this person, then jump there, then go somewhere else” * Many dialogues feel odd and rather flat since the new voice synchronization * Entire missions that were reworked no longer make sense in their sequence * Many gameplay elements lack explanations or tooltips * You can carry multiple weapons (ground battles) that all clip into each other on your back. Mass Effect handled this better * There is hardly any NPC ship traffic, which makes the universe feel empty * There is no explanation of the other factions. Unfortunately, they are also not introduced well in the story missions. I have no idea who is good or bad I could go on endlessly with smaller issues, but these are the main points that really bother me. If some of these things improve over time, I will change my review to positive. 👍