Starfighter Origins Remastered

While the title entices with interesting mechanics and ideas - especially for those of us who fondly look back on titles such as wing commander and freelancer - there are an insurmountable number of issues with this title that hamper it. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ7ln3kZCQo Text: Before anything else we need to look at the control options and control scheme. While the game support full key rebindings it lacks a functional mouse movement support so while you can rebind you keys to your mouse buttons... moving your mouse doesn't actually do anything, and if that wasn't bad enough the default binding only work on the xbox controller. Moving on further, the games issues in terms of controls also translate to movement and interaction with the world, with physics being wonky, animations being non-existent and various targeting, aiming and particle effects causing more problems than they solve. Lastly, while the flying feels good and the game has quite a bit of replayable content, there is a distinct cal of polish moving on into the campaign as well with mission failing to update objectives and thus not being finish able. While an interesting idea, the game has to many mechanical issues, to many design choice frustrations and a complete lack of any polish you might expect.

https://youtu.be/kgjxonzOxp0 As a huge fan of the Space Combat Sim Genre, I had high hopes for this game and seeing where this game took it's inspiration from I admit I allowed myself to get a bit excited. However, what I was forced to endure for my First Impressions review quickly dispelled any vestige of hope or excitement. The options menus are a broken mess, some even requiring a loading screen? Also there is no menu for audio adjustments and the buttons to select an inverted Y axis do not seem to function at all. Also, in spite of the Developer's claim for HOTAS support, the game refused to recognize my joystick and only allowed me to use the controller... where I'm sorry but right stick for maneuvering and left stick for throttle? To me that seems exceptionally backwards. The game itself is buggy and tedious. It requires you to slog through the tutorial missions before it will even unlock the campaign. Once you finally get there, IF you manage to get the campaign to load, you will be met with more tedium and broken missions. There is a good game here, but it is buried under layers of inadequate controls, menus, and bugs both game breaking and non. Do not buy until the game is HEAVILY patched. See my First Impressions Review above for more information.

Alright, I’m going to be upfront, I did not really enjoy this game, but I want to be constructive with this review. Starfighter Origins plays like an alpha to me. There are some interesting elements, but I feel like the game hasn’t been fleshed out completely and I ran into several buggy spots while playing. The first issue I had was with the controls themselves. I tried this game using both the controller and the keyboard. With the controller, only half the controls worked initially. After a quick reset, the main ship controls worked, but other functions, like the match speed function, still didn’t work. As for the keyboard controls, the given controls spread players fairly far across the keyboard with buttons programed across the board. Luckily, the game does offer players the option to rebind these keys, however the first time I attempted this every key defaulted to pause. Again, the second time the key rebinding worked, but it was an issue. As for the game play itself, the UI is built into the design of the ship, which is fine and fits with the aesthetic of the game, but the UI changes between the different kinds of ships, small shifts in where information is and what it looks like. This wasn’t a huge issue, but in the tutorial the layout of the UI is explained for a specific ship and so it could be a little disconcerting to quickly adjust to a different UI. Additionally, some of the information displayed seemed extraneous to the game (i.e. there were numbers and bars that did not seem to have a bearing on the ship), and some of the information didn’t feel particularly useful (like the speed of the ship, which you didn’t really notice a huge change in when floating through space). That being said, there were elements that I liked; in particular, I liked the radar, which was able to show not only the direction of targets in the 2D plane, but also where targets were in the 3D plane, which was helpful in pinpointing tiny targets in a large space. Also, I liked the targeting screen which game the player a sonar view of the playing field making it easier to find and target enemies in the space. However, I would prefer that the scanning view was the normal view out of the windscreen because even though I think the game had some beautiful scenery, since the game focuses on targeting enemies and fighting, I think the focus should have been on optimizing finding targets, which were hard to spot. As for the mechanics, the firing and targeting seemed to work fine, but the match speed function slowed the craft to zero. The firing was simple, although in the heat of battle it felt a little slow. Also, when in battle, it felt difficult to follow what was happening in battle. I was almost constantly barrel rolling the ship attempting to find my targets. Final note, the game crashed 4 times while I was trying to play. Three of the crashes were on the pirate battle simulator and all of them came up as fatal errors. Overall the game was buggy and like I said, just needs fleshing out.

I'm afraid it really is as bad as people say. I didn't listen to the reviews and purchased. 20 minutes later I hit the refund button. Optimisation is horrible, controls hideous and it's just boring. Yes it is a looker but that can't hide it's many and game breaking faults. I wanted to like this and for people to be wrong but I couldn't and they are not. I love space sims but comparing this to wing commander, freespace and star wars is just wrong. It's set in space and there the similarity ends.

First Impression Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQltZea6ufs&feature=youtu.be [h1]A key to this game was given to me about 30 minutes before release from the developer[/h1] I really wanted to enjoy this, and at some points I did, but I think the game currently falls a bit flat. Right away, you are forced to play through training missions, being locked out of the campaign until you complete all 4. The training missions are a bit boring and really could have been implimented in the first mission of the actual campaign. I can tell they put a lot of effort into making nice cutscenes, but the voice actor sounds like he is talking from the bottom of a well (echo and reverb are set extremely high). Also, the loading of the cutscences seems excessive. Loading happens between the beginning and end of each cutscene, and the game has 2 cut scences per mission. Having 4 load sequences per mission is a tad bit excessive. Perhaps the mission end and next mission begining cut scences could be combined together? As far as actual gameplay, I played with an Xbox control (as was recommended by the dev), and for the most part controls were okay. I say okay, because it is very very difficult to hit enemies with your base lazor at range. Maybe it's just because I'm not used to controler joysticks as much as a mouse/keyboard, but I really struggled. Also, why not have mouse/keyboard support? Mission-wise, things are a bit dull: -First mission you fly around for about 10 minutes in formation and fight only 1 guy the entire time. -Second mission, you fly around in formation for another 10 minutes before arriveing at a wreck and getting called back to your ship. Seriously that is it. No combat, no real involvment at all from the player. -Third mission there is some action finally, as you are needed to destroy 2 larger ships. You park yourself near the ship and fire away for about 2 minutes before the thing finally explodes. Would not have been so bad if there were indictions that you were actually damaging the ship. (maybe have parts fall off the ship, or fires break out, or something?) Then you fight 3 enemy fighters and redock. Again, I stress how difficult and annoying it is to try and line up your shots on what essensially is a niddlehead on your screen. To conclude, I think this game has potential, but they need to iron out some issues. I get that this is launch day, and issues are to be expected, but in its current state, I cannot recommend.

Remember, this is NOT early access!! (and I don't know why) I REALLY tried to play it, becauseI wanted to, so even after being dissapointed to HAVE to play the tutorials in order to play the campaign I wanted to give it my everything, but then sitting there for about 3 minutes so that I can listen to the lamest AI voice ever while doing NOTHING, NOTHING AT ALL... Ok.. that was hard to overcome... but then she just won't shut up, and every single thing has to be explained while you just sit and try out the different buttons because you didn't play attention in the beginning, but she even has to commentate every single mode you turn on and off, so you try to push every single button on the controller while she is saying out lout what you're doin, while at the same time she is trying to tell you something new.... pure chaos... but ok, after a few minuted I got the controlls and basically knew how most of this works... -> next objective: find a Drone and destroy it, ok , why not. So I try to find the smallest spaceship in the histroy of mankind, using the most useless radar in mankind, at that point I though: ok, if one more thing is broken, boring or not well planned, I give up.... then I flew through an Asteroid and quit 2/10 - I like the idea.... ThBest way to sum this game up: mess that someone tried to fix, but failed and amde it worse

Tutorial is bad, simply bad. It's just a voice with no subtitles, explaining everything and then throwing a buttons list in your face, pretending you'd be able to memorize them all in the span of one minute, then it proceeds to just refer to commands as "scan button", "acceleration", etc. I can't learn the game like this, there's no gradual easing of the player into the controls, no way for the player to easily discover the controls one by one like most standard tutorials do. If a game fails in the tutorial phase then the whole game fails.

The game is not as horrible as the nay sayers have been droning on about. However to be fair the game is far from perfect. I got the game expecting the worst based on the reviews. But it seems the developer has been taking a look at the reviews both here and other media and slowy fixing some of the more "painful" issues. I have had no major issues with the game up to this point, most of the issues I've had were with game play as there are certain things that can be improved upon with ship to ship combat and cockpit layout. For what its worth I think this is a great contribution from the independant developer side of the house. So far I have been enjoying the game. If the Dev of this project keeps adding to this game I believe you'll have a decent space sim over some time. But alot more work is needed. Adding joystick support would greatly add to the feel of a space sim. As well add difficulty settings for the entire campaing rather than just in the instant action portion of the game. All in all I hope the developer keeps adding to this game, because I see alot of potential here.

Played for a Hour.....Sloppy controls. Game mechanics also sloppy.

This software in the current state is pretty unplayable. No tutorial in the tutorial missions. No way to exit a mission. No joystick support for a FLYING game. I'm not even sure this one has potential. I tried the first tutorial twice... then I just force closed the game. And now I have delete and reinstall the game for the update to work correctly. I even asked for a refund and they never responded. Don't recommend this game or the guys who made it.