I actually enjoyed it, but that took about a solid 45 minutes of fumbling around with the atrocious controls (which aren't remappable) and figuring out a way to basically ignore most of the level. If the controls were fixed I think this game would actually be pretty good but, as is, this game is barely playable, if that. Difficulty in a game should come from level design, not from you being unable to move properly due to the controls.
Tross is a game that tries to capture the feeling of the Death Star level in Star Wars Rogue Squadron and the ship escape level in Saints Row 4. This is a great idea imo and I gotta admit it's not a terrible game. It'd be a pretty damn good game if the person who chose the control scheme wasn't mad.
First-off the movement groups make no sense. Pitching up and down is paired with rotating your ship and speeding up and down is paired with turning, this applies to both controller and mouse&keyboard. This makes flying an absurdly awkward thing to do, it makes no sense that you would be able to move up and down with the mouse/right joystick but simultaneously not be able to turn with it, instead when you try to turn the ship your entire ship rolls. A sane person (i.e. the people who did Freelancer, War Thunder, or any other flying game) would have paired turning the ship up and down and side to side the mouse/right joystick and put rolling the ship alongside the speed on A&D/Left Joystick. This cannot be remapped.
Secondly, the things that CAN be adjusted start off at very weird settings. Inversion is on by default which makes zero sense because the controller is disabled by default. Inversion only really works well ON joysticks.
Now I say "the controller is disabled by default" loosely, hilariously when the controller is disabled it still works. I would have never even known the controller was disabled if I didn't dig through the settings, I really thought controller support was just plain broken. Why? Because despite the controller being disabled you can still FLY with it. You can fly but you can't shoot, start the level without using the keyboard, or open the menu (granted you can't open the menu even if you have the controller enabled). What switching controllers on does is let you shoot, change the text at the start at levels to press up on controller to start level (W on keyboard still works funnily enough despite the gamepad not being able to start levels when on mouse and keyboard mode) and shoot.
Mouse sensitivity is horrible, the default sensitivity was so low I had to make huuuge swipes across my desk to turn or roll the ship. Now keep in mind I have my mouse set at 8000dpi. I had to double the sensitivity in the game in order to make moving seem even feasible. Doubling is the maximum, this makes me question whether this game is even playable for anyone with a lower sensitivity mouse.
The level designs: they're not bad admittedly, there are some annoyances but honestly if the game controlled properly I would probably enjoy them much more. They've got some nice things to fly around and little tunnels and crevices like one would expect from this type of game. The few problems I have though are more related to the fact that some parts of the levels seem more designed to be unfair than challenging. For instance, the first level has the target rotating, you can only shoot the yellow bit that is moving. Fair enough, the issue with this level is that for a solid 2/3rds of it you can't even get to a place where you can shoot it because the sphere it is on is backed right up against a wall. Most of the time limit will be spent doing fly-bys and waiting for the sphere to hopefully rotate the bit to face you right when you are flying towards it and spam your guns at a pre-aimed spot where it will rotate into. This would be a lot easier if not for the awkward control scheme. With the control scheme, adjusting your craft to shoot at a moving object is more often than not possible, which is presumably why all the levels that I played after do not feature a moving target at all.
The next level is actually feels somewhat well designed. You fly through a bunch of tight vertical pillars into an area where the targets will send out two large horizontal walls to crush you. This is straightforward enough and makes sense. The part that doesn't make sense is the "debris" which gets sent flying at you during this attack. There are cubes all over the floor that supposedly get tossed around by the impact of the walls, the issue is half these cubes manage to magically clip right through those two solid walls trying to crush you. They then start bouncing everywhere, somehow now unable to clip through the walls, creating a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in the tiny space between the upper wall attack and the actual ceiling of the level. I'm perfectly fine with the idea of debris flying everywhere as an obstacle but not if the stuff magically appears out of nowhere and start flying at you from unknown angles. At that point it's not a matter of avoiding the cubes but hoping to hell the physics engine doesn't bounce one at you from behind the camera where you can't see it.
There are other issues which I will get into in the actual video review (this is a lot of text as is).
I can't recommend this game in the current state. The level design is actually not horrible, I would recommend this game if it weren't for the dreadful control scheme. Either fix the damn controls, or give the players the option to change the controls themselves. It should go without saying that a game that relies on precise moving should have controls that function well. Nobody wants to play Freelancer with qwop controls. The only way I have managed to progress in the game is basically by flying up to the top of the levels where there are minimal obstacles and flying the plane sideways for the rest of the game. If this game controlled well it'd probably be a pretty damn good game.
