Starship EVO

The game engine is clearly a masterpiece of solo development, it's clearly taken a lot of time and care to get it to this point where you can build ships and bases and explore the galaxy. There's still a lot of bugs, but they tend relatively small. Where the game currently falls over is the gameplay. The focus on development has been largely technical, and all gameplay systems currently implemented are very basic and shallow. If you wanna build fancy spaceships and enjoy making them fight each other, this is the one you've been looking for. If you're looking for a polished survival experience, it needs a little more time in the oven. It's clear there's something extremely special here.

I am very pleasantly surprised by the game. As a veteran of Space Engineers (900+ hours), No Man's Sky (300+ hours), Empyrion (700+ hours) and similar games of the same genre. I have only just discovered this little gem, although the game has been around since 2020. Yes, the game has a bunch of minor unfinished work, I don't know, I feel like the game is completely in the hands of one developer or a small group, but the development is active and the speed at which bugs are fixed is surprising. However, what is the main reason why I rate this game very positively is the concept of building elements that can be extended at will, giving endless scope for those who are really creative. The system of construction, ships, mechs and stations is very intuitive. The game contains elements of exploration (generative galaxy), mission completion, and also tension in the form of NPCs, who behave unfriendly in certain situations, so the occasional fight is a diversion. I like when I can spend hundreds of hours in a game and still discover something new, and I feel like this game is of that kind.

I'm sorry, but based on my experiences with Empyrion, SE and other games of this type i cannot recommend this with a good conscience. The first hours are just frustrating and not fun. 1. You get stuck constantly and cannot climb normal hills without activating the no clip mode with F5 (flying around in god mode) 2. You are super slow. To alleviate that, you can build a scooter. Unfortunately the scooter is just awful to steer, you cannot steer with your mouse view, you need to use the WASD keys. While you can control the scooter without staying on it, you need to stand on it and THEN activate to even use it to drive anywhere,what the actual f? When you do not need it, the scooter just bounces off, topples over and lay on the ground. Why not at least keep it standing or add a docking station to recharge it or something. This feels like a sandbox for unfinished features. 3. This game has been in EA for over 6 years and even longer if you add the kickstarter, most of these complaints have been raised AGES ago and nothing has happened. And yes, I'm aware that this game was made by a single dev. I appreciate this fact, but to be honest, if you cannot even get the first hour right and appealing for players, even experienced survival players, what is the point of the game? You are just alienating 60% of your target audience, before the game is even finished! That is just a poor choice of priorities in my opinion. I thought after Empyrion, SE and New Dawn this might be a hidden gem, but based on my experiences this is just a pain to go through. Yes according to everybody the building system is good, but if the time you need to get there is just a painful, frustrating, eyerolling chore, what's the point? Feels like the Master of Orion 3 lunatics that tell you, you need to play 30 hours of crappy gameplay, THEN it becomes fun. Yeah right, if you have 30h to burn to get to the good part, its just bad game design, nothing more, nothing less. Maybe i will look at it in 24 months or so, but atm i just want to throw my mouse through the brick wall playing this. In this state it is not worth the 24 bucks, hell, i bought Empyrion, Subnautica and SP for 10 each! Stay clear of this one, maybe check later in 24 months or so and only buy on sale, 10 bucks or below. Requesting 24 bucks for this game is an insult to all the better survival space games out there that cost less.

go in expecting one thing. a buggy mess. it is an amazing game, but i feel like it can only earn that title once it fixes its bugs. also expect reloading your game every 10 minutes or so. the building mechanics are really good, and so is everything else, but its too buggy to enjoy it. hopefully the finished game brings more of a smile to my face. My vote is a yellow thumbs in the middle, but that doesn't exist. thumbs down.

I’m going to focus my review on the survival mode of the game, since I haven't actually touched creative mode. THE GOOD STUFF - The game looks beautiful, and the trailers don’t do justice to some moments when you’re crossing between the sun’s light, a planet’s rings and the atmosphere just right. - The game handles that pesky balance between simplicity and complexity very well. Is it easy to build a ship? Yes, overall it’s very very easy to put blocks together in a vaguely appealing way, and add the functional blocks you need. However, all the tools to make a complex ship full of frills are available if you want (you want to make the enterprise D with a detachable saucer? Go for it, it’s doable). - Progression is beautiful currently. Reaching space for the first time, reaching a new planet, a new solar system, activating your first warp drive… they all feel like major milestone achievements and are essentially the indicator of how far you’ve come since you first started on that silly red speck of dust a dozen lightyears behind you. - Do you like dogfighting combat? Good, we have that. Do you like star-trek style capital ships shooting blasts from across a half kilometre? We have that too. How about star wars fight— Yeah I think you get the idea. Build your ship for the experience you want, and you’ll pretty much get it! - DO NOT FEAR THE LOGIC SYSTEM!!! Just ignore 90% of it unless you’re into it, grab the event gate, because you can link it to your controls and guns to make left-click into the shoot button. Very convenient. - It, for me, is like if someone was making space engineers without all the small annoyances I hated, made resources and crafting recipes reasonable, make more sense, possible purely in survival, then went on to add actual content intrinsic to the game and not just player-made, improved on the controls, weapon controls and aesthetics, added more flexibility to what you can make, made it look better, added real character customisation, better and more interesting travel mechanics, energy shields and other advanced tech… list kinda just keeps going that way. THE BAD STUFF - It crashes when I shoot mining lasers at trees from out of the chunk load distance sometimes - Multiplayer doesn’t work at the time I’m writing - The pirate I was told would guard my gate didn’t spawn :( - If you have motion sickness? I dunno if you CAN play this. This is the main thing I’d say, is that even though I LOVE how ships fly? It *does* come with motion that can make you wanna puke. Spinning + good graphics is a m*thaf*cka STUFF I PERSONALLY WOULD LOVE TO SEE (the game is early access, so this is mostly stuff I think would be cool to see added, or I already expect will be added but I think would improve the experience most to get added sooner) - Multiplayer. You bet your ass I wanna drag my boyfriend, siblings and friends and make a purposely impractical ship with controls spread across multiple consoles so we can all fit into a role and explore the galaxy. - Some more aggressive random encounters. Right now they’re pretty optional, but I think the galaxy map being wrong or incomplete would be cool, and being able to accidentally jump into a black hole system, or a pirate den which all start attacking you, anomalies which do some messed up nonsense, etc etc. - Collision damage. I wanna RAM PEOPLE YEEEEEEAAAA— - Predictive aiming? My automated turrets kinda just aim where enemies are, rather than where they *will be* based on their speed. There’s no lead aiming so *most* of the shots miss, unless the enemy is stationary, or travelling in a straight line towards or away from me. - Explosive blocks (I want to make proximity mines) - Remote controls (I want to make remote-control missiles) - NPCs you can hire to fly ships for you (I want to become a fleet commander, and/or the owner of a mining conglomerate…) - Cloaking devices? THE REALLY FRINGE STUFF (Just getting into stuff which maybe shouldn’t be added, but WOULD be super cool) - Empire mechanics, where you can found and control your own faction, declare wars, engage in diplomacy, maybe even with some quests like “you must meet the leader of the gooblegorbs in person at a station in the Krumb system, to discuss relations. You have 6 minutes to get there GOOD LUCK (or ignore it and they declare war)”

This is very much like Avorion, but with ship interiors and planet exploration and bases! EVO runs well with Proton on Linux, and I've not had any crashes either! I have over 40 hours of fun building and exploring so far. The developer is showing real commitment by fixing bugs and improving game play. Survival mode is new but welcome, though it's not terribly challenging, nothing on the planets is a threat, except for the possibility of running out of oxygen. There are pirates and factions in the galaxy that can end your ship, but so far it's trivial to respawn your creations and you don't lose your inventories. I think it's good for a game in this state to make it easy to retry scenarios and game mechanics for testing, but I'm looking forward to more challenging play in the future. Ship building is by far the best experience as there are lots of ways to have moving parts and logic systems for automation. Blocks can be stretched out (like in Avorion). You can create a ship that has a full and interactive interior to inhabit! Ships and parts can be shared with the Workshop too! Ship physics is more arcade than simulation and there is no collision damage as yet. Weapons building, automation, defense tech and balancing energy use with generation and fuel storage are where the combat is a fun challenge already. Planets and moons have deformable terrain and resources that you can enter and leave seamlessly with your ship. You can also explore them on foot, with land vehicles or in mechs. Hopefully there will also be NPCs, creatures etc on planets as well. Explorable space stations already have NPC's you can hire for your ship. Basic trade and mission systems also make them worth visiting. You can heal yourself and repair and refuel your ship in these stations as well.

Multiplayer requires port forwarding, but the game costs 36.50 AUD? Interesting. Mind you, the game used to be $29.50 AUD with no sale in March, and then the developer increased it to $36.50 AUD. Now, during the steam summer sale, it's at a 20% discount for $29.20 AUD. Without a doubt, for what this game is offering, it's worth $15 AUD. Not $36.50. EDIT - I'll explain further. I bought the game because I knew if I'm unsatisfied with it, I can get a refund. I completed the tutorial, and then me and my friend spent 2 hours trying to get port forwarding to work, so of course I kept my gametime in mind for refund purposes. This game has the multiplayer tag, but it doesn't even really offer multiplayer. 80% of users can't get port forwarding to work because of the game. Look on their Discord, there are users complaining of the same issue. I went there myself to get it working, and nearly everyone is having the same problem. The dev's response? "Did you read the description? It's kinda your fault" and "Try port forwarding." It is super misleading. The developer's top priority is to add new updates and increase the price of the game, not first fix the vital issues that most users complain about. This game is basically competing with No Man's Sky, which is $35 on sale at the moment. $6 difference, and this game doesn't even offer working multiplayer. Then there's the fake sales. Game used to be $29, increased to $36, now it's $29 on sale. It's allowed on Steam, but it's perfect for deceiving users into thinking they're getting a good deal. It's what my local supermarkets do lol. Dev is like "Yeah, price increase is due to the survival update." Oh, but multiplayer is broken? What on earth justifies a price increase? Sure is a coincidence that it's on sale at EXACTLY $29!!!! Lastly, when I give a negative review, he brings in 3 accounts from Norway that do not own the game to ridicule it. Same arguments his mods make on Discord, blaming the user for not reading the description. He and his mods push the blame onto the users instead of owning up to it and changing it. Next time, don't send your goons to go after negative reviews. You'll only make it worse on yourself.

Great game, its a 10/10 if you're looking for a ship builder by itself. I haven't seen many of these games, StarMade, Avorion, Space Engineers have build tools nearly as free as this game does. That being said, it defo needs a lot more of work. I see the vision, but once I had completed a few ships I'd done it all. Combat is really lacking, the missions were a bit buggy. Survival is there, but not complete. Multiplayer seems pretty broken. I have been following the game for a short while and updates are churning out, I'm sure it will get there. This is a game to keep an eye on, in a year or two it will be amazing.

Can't really recommend currently. The bugs are too constant and make playing the game hard. 1st bug I encountered when building a ship in survival, When removing a block that I no longer wanted on my ship it forced a small rotation of the rest of the platform I was building on. This eventually after deleting blocks rotating my entire build almost upside down and made building extremely difficult. 2nd major bug was when building a hovercraft I'd finished the basic build of it and just went to test thrust etc on the boat. Now I needed it to float in the air and to do that you attach a construction anchor this usually lets the thing you are working on float slightly above the ground so you can easily continue building and designing.. Well.. it floated off into space and became unretrievable...