Starship EVO

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.

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.

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)”

I'm really on the fence with this. Building is indeed fantastic... Except the intricacies of building things functionally are absolutely stupid. 1. There's no instruction whatsoever about how to use a shipyard. You can't build on it, you can't build in it, it's a static structure, which means it's a building, not a ship. You can't fly a building. 2. You can't build a ship that links up to your fuel creation farm, because that requires it being a building, because magically, hoses don't connect things if they aren't perfectly lined up on the grid. Because hoses aren't... flexible, right? 3. Connector ports are supposed to transfer fuel and such, but they're constantly showing max connections even when they aren't connected to anything at all, so you have to constantly reload the game to force them to work. (They stop working immediately after you connect anything to them at all. Now for the obnoxious things. A. There's no "quit to menu" option. That's just dumb, considering how often you have to reload the game to make things work properly. B. There's no save feature, which means if you encounter a bug that destroys 4 hours of ship building in an instant, you're SOL. C. The copy tool empties if you reload to make things work correctly, waisting all of that time you spent building your ship-that-isn't-a-ship. Bottom line? I've spent more time watching youtube tutorials on HOW to play this game than I've spent playing it, because "just playing it and winging it" is so vile it's likely listed specifically as a no-no in the Geneva Convention. That being said... WHEN or IF this game works, it's delightful. But if the devs aren't going to fix these game-breaking bugs and add some tooltips or help guides that actually make sense to people with less than 180 IQ? The LEAST they can do is add a save feature so we can salvage countless hours of effort spent without having to start over on a nearly daily basis.

The game has serious potential, however, until they remove this frankly garbage flight/mouse control model I can't recommend the game. At all... Piloting is such a huge part of this game that it just ruins the play experience currently. Pilot mode, especially the way it has been implemented in this game, is just clunky and not good. Combine that with the fact that it's near impossible to see the UI for it in most backgrounds, and it makes it near impossible to pilot correctly in most situations. Why won't they just give us a direct mouse control like nearly every other game in this genre?!?!? I don't care if they want to keep pilot mode, but it should be a setting AND it should default to standard direct mouse control. I really wish I had refunded before I played too long. However you will be out of the refund window long before you build up to this stage to notice how bad it is. I'll be happy to edit my review once such a change has been made.

not ready yet, still so so so many bugs. from basic logic to blocks randomly stop working.

This game has enormous potential, give it time. The guy's trying, it shows. It's a great build. I've been working on the ship for two weeks now, and I'll spend another two to create my own masterpiece, and then I'll have fun. Seriously, give it a chance. I see potential. Please stop leaving negative reviews.

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.

Its fun for an hour then its just a bit boring to be honest . Its very buggy with block placement and that's why I quit, too frustrating having to keep deleting stuff and rebuilding. I'll maybe give it another try in a year or two.