The Battle of Sol

Recommendation - Not so much (After about 5 + hours) I love Space Sims so I try a new one every now and again. This is not Freespace2, Freelancer, Wing Commander or the Alpha of Star Citizen. This is a mission to mission game where a single failure and you cannot move on. Pros 1. Easy to play Cons 1. On the rail format for story - (You pass or fail a mission but cannot move on if you fail) 2. No customization for ships. 3. No choice for load out. 4. Cardboard props for characters. 5. No interest in re-play. 6. Voice acting... Meh. So why should you play. Well to be honest if you need to blow stuff up without caring of story or characters than this can get you by.

Just a couple of things... There are a lot of great things about this game - graphics, story... lots of potential. That said, flight mechanics and a couple of other things leave A LOT to be desired. 1) No side thrusters - up, down, left or right. Unless I don't understand the controls, you can't control the direction of your ship... only backward or forward. Even Tom Hanks had side thrusters in Apollo 13. 2) Buggy. Sound goes in and out (I've checked my machine and settings.. definitely on the side of the game). You can travel through ship models... I've designed 3d spaceships for games before and this isn't a hard issue to avoid. I DO recommend this game as it has a lot of potential. I suggest they model their flight mechanics as Allegiance did, which is considered semi-Newtonian.

Bit Planet has done some very cool things with this game. Normally, I would hit the good points first, but I want to get my complaints out of the way. On the plot side, the characterizations of the different pilots can be pretty cartoony, to the point of things becoming unbelievable. Lieutenants have an alarming tendency to order captains (and even generals) around, and it's done with complete impunity. It was hard for me to suspend my disbelief in that area. Further, there is an outsized amount of profanity used by a particular pilot, and it seems to be gratuitous rather than character establishing. (Maybe it's just me.) Speaking technically, the game does have some nagging, but mercifully un-fatal bugs. The first is that the Ingress/ hacking loop still delivers invalid codes in some situations. It's incredibly frustrating to select what should be the right code, only to have it fail...and be taking fire from a number of turrets at the same time. Also, there's an occasional graphics glitch where a "sun" overlay gets plastered all over the center of your screen. (The problem can be quickly fixed by selecting a different screen resolution, and then reverting.) Every once in a while, a rough edge in overall experience design makes a glaring appearance. The most notable of these was a mission where you have to save some transports that are dropping through atmosphere. The success/ fail conditions for the mission are not at all clear at first, although the success condition is so low that I suppose you can shrug your shoulders a bit. My final negative point is that "jinking" in a tough dogfight doesn't seem to be possible. If an enemy fighter succeeds in getting you "zeroed," you either have afterburners available for escape, or you're in big trouble. The only turning option you have seems to be heading directly toward your attacker, which lets them hammer you several more times before they overshoot. Hopefully, you're not in a crowd. But the above paragraph leads me into what's really, really good about the game: Energy management. Really. There are lots of other space sims that give you the ability to transfer energy amongst three systems, such as shields, weapons, and afterburner. In every other such game that I've played, that energy management is fairly secondary. In "Battle Of Sol," it's front and center in a very neat and satisfyingly challenging way. Especially when flying the Hades(?), each energy reserve is pretty shallow. You have to keep your head in the ETS game, or you will be in enormous trouble. This lends a nice boost to the tension of combat, especially because the basic dogfighting isn't all that hard. The criticality of the energy management also helps to create noticeable differentiation between the Hades and the Arrow fighters. Arrows don't let you manage energy transfer manually, and the afterburners are "all or nothing," but the regen time is fast...for two out of three systems. The bugbear you get to wrestle with is that shield regeneration isn't under your control - you have to escape from combat almost entirely if your Arrow gets mangled. This "personality difference" really keeps you on your toes, and is a great way to add variety where a whole bunch of different ships aren't a gameplay option. Another great choice by the developers is the need to master the "slide" mechanic. In other games, the ability to keep your heading while changing your orientation is handy, if not necessarily required. In this game, you'll either get it or get torn to shreds. Giving thought to your heading and then engaging a slide is the only thing that will keep you effective against gun platforms and capital ships. Once you do get it, you'll feel very much more like an ace pilot, especially since you'll actually be able to do some good. Another thing I like was the (seeming) overall homage to the reimagined "Battlestar Galactica." The UCS missions often feature percussion-heavy music that would fit right in with BSG, and the Hades guns seem to behave - and sound - very much like what you would find on a Colonial Viper. Maybe this was all intentional, and maybe it wasn't...but it's fun either way, and made me smile. Bit Planet has really done some fine work here, and I think they could build a real challenger to Wing Commander and Freespace if they keep iterating and extending what they've got already. This particular game isn't an instant classic, mosty because it's not deep enough for that, but the seeds do seem to be there.

If you are a fan of any of the following: -Wing Commander -Freespace -XWing GET THIS GAME! These guys understand how to make a fun arcadey space sim without mining or economics. There's dogfighting, there's really big ships, and there's space debris. Pew pew pew! Enjoy!

+Cool space backgrounds. +Entertaining dogfights. +Voice dialogs. +Easy to learn how to play. +Nice music. +Ability to issue some basic commands to your fleet. +Story to be continued. I hope the sequel will be much better overall. -Unable to modify ships and weapons. -Very few available weapons to use. -No much variation of ships. -Difficult to control on specific objectives. In fact some of the last missions were really frustrating. -Average graphics. -Short campaign. -Unclear how the story goes. -Although you may give commands to your fleet, there's not much of any help. I put this game as recommended only for those who enjoy space sims and collect this category of games. Otherwise, I think that you will not enjoy it much.

I don't normally do this so I apologize in advanced. I will try to be as nice as possible.... 1) Game looks pretty nice, cap ships look cool and at first I thought "wow this is gonna be cool!" 2) Hotas support is a real pain. I don't want to go into too much detail here but it took me hours to setup. I gave up trying honestly cuz I bought this game a few days after release. Now finally today I dedicated another 3 hours to trying to to setup my Hotas. I have CH fighterstick and CH pro throttle. It is SOOOO complicated with about 40 different axis choices and it doesn't sense any axis so you must do this manually. Would be easy without the maybe 15 or so subcategories for axis. I have never seen anything this complicated and I have played many space sims. Feels like they just threw HOTAS support in for us and said "you figure it out!". In the end of a 3 hour setup run I finally stopped trying to designate my throttle and rolls to any axis. I just shut them off and found out how to designate those controls to the keyboard. In other words, old school 90s wing commander style play from here out, Stick and keyboard. Still, I was determined to give this an honest try. 3) Sounds Really rough here. When overheating you hear a loud "ping!". Thought I could turn that effect down by turning sound fx down and leaving music and master volume up but nope. Just turns down other sounds but that damn ping sound stays loud as hell! The weapon sounds are also really bad here. No real gun sounds and no real missile sounds. One good thing I will say is the voice acting is pretty cool. Well done in that department. 4) Gameplay. Really simple, boring fighting. Made it 10 missions in. Only way you can tell you are being attacked is a red color in the corner of your ship. No feel of impact or sound effects to help you know. Also on the flipside it's hard as hell to tell you are hitting the enemy ship other than they visually take damage. Even after all the HOTAS nightmares the joystick randomly rolls while making fast movements. The CH Fighterstick CANNOT ROLL so this is a software problem with the game. This never happened in any space sims I ever played before. Very annoying. Also everytime to fire your guns the whole screen blurs up and shakes like crazy. Not cool man.... 5) Summary Guys, I thank you for trying to make a fun single player space combat game. I miss these types of games dearly as a big fan of the glory days of Wing Commander, Freespace, X Wing and Tie Fighter. However, this time...mission not accomplished. I am very sorry to write a review like this. But the fact that I paid money for this game is a damn shame. I have played fan made mods of Wing Commander and Freespace games that are honestly 10 times as good as this. Those were made by non pros. Examples would be Wing Commander Saga, Wing Commander Standoff, and about a dozen Freespace mods. I do however hope you guys try again sometime soon. But you need to take your time and make a good game. Make the game interesting. Instead of just checkpoints all the time give us real destinations. The guns need to feel like guns. Missles need to be improved greatly. The art style you guys used was awesome. IT LOOKS SWEET!! Also, next time you build a space combat game, make it with the HOTAS in mind from the beginning. Don't just tack in on after the fact. Space combat games died with Freelancer and I think a big part of that was the fact that this is the beginning of mouse space combat games. Alright, that's all I have to say. Once again, I'm really sorry to the creators if this sounds harsh......but it's all the truth. I respect you a lot for trying but this has been a terrible gaming experience for me.

Edit 07/07/2015 Just finished the storyline and the game definitely left me wanting more. The devs are also very responsive, I encountered a bug and it was patched immediately. Another patch dropped today so it is obvious the devs are looking to support this game. Very pleased and looking forward for a continuation of the storyline! Original Review This game is an amazing accomplishment because it does something that a lot of these new space fighter games have not done, remind me of the old days. The flight mechanics are straight old school. Many have complained about the lack of strafe but old school games like Wing Commander did not have strafe. Slide however works exactly like it did in Wing Commander 3. I do have two complaints and please note I have not yet finished the game. The ships, while controlling great, do not feel to have much speed. There are afterburners but they are used up quick, which I do not mind. I just wish there top speed of the craft was higher. My second complaint is that I have only been allowed to pilot two different fighters. Again I have yet to finish the story line so maybe I will get additional starfighters as the game progresses. If you are a fan of old school starfighters I highly recommend this purchase.

Going straight to the point: I don't like this game so much, because it's made of short single missions which should be part of a whole story, but: [list] [*] Each mission is really short and all of them (at least the ones I played so far) are located in a very limited space, you're so near to mother spaceships and enemies that it's easy to even collide with them. Gameplay is about locking targets and firing at them; when objectives are achieved, you'll fly back into mothership and the mission will quit. You have turrets and missiles, can adjust power between trust and armor so to gain advantage in any of those and can repair the hull using that same power sources. There's really not much more to tell. [*] About the story, I couldn't understand it at all, there's a bunch of messages between pilots and commanders and they are all "thrown" at you without a proper background, apart from the brief introductory cutscenes which only tell a basic story about Earth being doomed and the need to find another system to live in. [/list] I'm still playing SOL, even because I've sinked only a couple of hours in and it's not so contemptible, but I expected more from a space sim, like it's advertised. This can be a nice game to buy in a bundle, I think.

Review: 2/5 In this game you pilot small fighter craft (think battlestar galactica style fighters) in narrated and linear space combat missions. The story and voice acting are boring and laughable at best. Graphics feel quite dated for a game released in 2015. As far as gameplay goes, the game attempts to make you feel like you are part of epic fleet vs fleet battles when in reality you are pointing your ship's crosshairs from red circle to red circle easily picking off enemy fighter OR pulling your hair out trying to shoot small turrets on large ships while dealing with the worst controls out of any space sim I've played. I attempted one mission atleast 10 times as I repeatedly would ram into the ship I was shooting at because you have to get within 2 meters of your target to even think about shooting these small turrets accurately. Too bad that's again rediculously frustrating to do when your ship weaves and bobs all over the place. Overall not recommended. Would need a serious overhaul.

This is an easy space fight game. It is fun and you just fly and shoot. I lost interest when my point of view switched to one of the religious fantatics. I just don't want to play one. And the rethorics of his (my) superiours where grating on my nerves. COULD NOT CONTINUE. I just did not want these idiots to win a single fight. Good game but I disliked the point of view I was forced into. The game is very "fast", with fast I don't want to say you have to react like a maniac. I want to say the game is fluent and you never have to think about screen stuttering or fps or whatever. The game is fast and fun. It could be for space shooters what the Call of Duty games are for shooters. Fun and easy and good action. No need to "learn" the game for days until you succeed. You start the game and have fun. This is good.