Starfighter: Infinity

Starfighter: Disputed Galaxy (SDG) was a fun little Flash time-waster on Kongregate back in the day. It had the beauty of being simple and fun, a quick little way to lose yourself in some pew-pew for 30 minutes or an hour. It was very much a "everything you need, nothing you don't" space game. The only limits on play were your number of kills. You could buy whatever weapons or tech you could afford and you could afford them fast. It was a terrific, uncomplicated game. I played it a lot and I was one of the 200 or so Kickstarter backers for this game back in 2017. Starfighter: Infinity is a slow, ponderous mess. There are about eight different systems here competing for the developer's time and all of them get short shrift. It takes forever to get anywhere, longer to complete the missions, longer still to level up for new ships, and you can't use any of these cool weapons that you're seeing in the trailer videos until you level up a bunch of separate skills for each type. (which -- believe it or not -- also takes forever). There's 200+ levels here, and 90% of the people who've played this game haven't reached level 15, which says something about how much fun you're going to have and how much time things take. That would be bad enough, but the game progression is also a mess. SDG wouldn't throw more at you than you could handle unless you specifically chose it or you leveled up to the point where you could handle it. Early game baddies were thin, firing simple weapons that were easily avoided. But they were also numerous which both added to the fun and let you build up a lot of kills quickly. Infinity takes the opposite approach in which supposedly "safe" sectors feature ships you can't buy yet firing weapons you won't recognize. An hour into the game in one of the starting sectors, I got hit by some kind of magnetic cluster bomb that killed me a good four or five seconds after its launching platform was dead and what the living **** is up with that. Did I mention that when you get killed, you lose the experience and bounty you've built up to that point since you undocked last? I didn't? It's true. So you'll struggle to get three or four kills, then have to scoot back to base to turn them in before you lose them. In SDG, over the course of early missions, you'd run into "ambush waves" of 7 light drones that you could assassinate with little danger letting you build up your confidence. Here, the early game weapons you get have very short ranges, do very little damage, and pull you into close combat with multiple types of guided weapons from multiple targets with equal or better shields than yours. Meanwhile, to make the background "interesting", there are lots of harmless little pixies and sprites that move around chaotically and are virtually indistinguishable for an inexperienced player with bullets and bombs of 10 different types that are trying to snuff out your life and that you have to dodge. And quite often, if you do get hit by these things, they smack you to one side, kill your momentum, slow you down, send you into a spin, and do other crazy **** even if they don't cluster around you and kill you. Again, all of this is in the first couple of hours of play. Finally, thanks to the eight different systems under construction -- the base game play, the missions, exploration, skill tree, tech tree, three different viewpoints, a VR mode, multiplayer -- this "Early Access" game has been in development since 2018 and there are still gaping holes. The user interface is dominated by tiny screen text which overlaps with other, tiny screen text, overlapping with other tiny screen text. I guarantee you you will be killed at least once in the first hour by an enemy that you didn't realize was there because the tiny text telling you his type and range was covered over by other tiny text letting you know that there is an asteroid in the same direction that you can mine for 11 credits. I bring this up because you'll see in an earlier Steam review that the developer said he'd address this issue... in 2019. So... yeah. A bit disappointing. 3/10.