Void Destroyer

Every time I have tried to play this before I found it a bit much to take in and have given up. Finally after years of having it sit in my library I gave it a earnest go. Now I am just pissed off. Finally figured it out trying to enjoy it and in the first mission I am sitting in my beat up base trying to upgrade my ship and build ships constantly getting attacked by suicidal enemies. My corvettes are tissue paper apparently even when I try to keep em at a distance since they seem to be missile boats. Then when I build a shipyard it triggers a whole bunch more enemies to spawn. I think I am at ship max being 6 corvette 10 fights + 6 drone and 4 frigs and the enemy jumps in with a ton of ships ignores my fleet and runs straight for my command ship ending the mission in moments even with most of the upgrades done. I even tried to hide the ship and put my fleet in the way. The ai just rushes my command ship and wipes it faster then I can do anything since the ship is slow and impossible to maneuver. SO I am permanently removing this from my steam account.

Sorry to be so negative here, but with each tutorial mission I became more and more frustrated and disenchanted with VD's obfuscated, anti-intuitive controls. On the first tutorial within seconds my first thought was how horrid the ship reacted to mouse inputs. As I progressed I was bombarded with more and more bizarre key combos and "shortcuts". The UI became ever more inept and useless IMO. By the 5th tutorial (which I could not even understand let alone complete) I'd had enough. Uninstall and find another game. I do not normally have any troubles with games of this kind. So VD is doing something wrong. Sorry to be vague, but other than p-poor UI I can't really give the developers any more feedback that would help them fix things. It was just one of those games I disliked at first try, which grew to hate as I persisted. Looking at other reviews and the forums I am not alone in this opinion. Of course, others love it - but I say a big "caveat emptor" to anyone thinking of buying this!

The concept for this game is extremely good, it reminds me of Home World and with the element of being able to control the ships manually adds a whole new level of gameplay. The execution of this game could use some work, which is why i have a negative review of unfortunetly; specifics below - It is very complex to learn, just to say the learning curve of the this game is quite high. Its very satisfying once you get the hang of it but many people will probably put the game down before figuring it out - It is extremely hard from a story driven perspective, the missions are far and away some of the hardest i have ever dealt with in years.You will need to move between manual control and RTS frequently to get the win. The developer has commented, he expects this to be a very hard game to win, which it is but i would argue its probably too hard. To note i did beat this game, but i used some very odd strategies that only work due to bugs/broken mechanics. - Its an extremely unforgiving campaign, the difficulty aside it doesn't help guide you through the game very well and as the difficulty ramps this becomes quite tiresome. For example, there are some missions that have requirements from previous missions, sometimes 2-3 missions back. If you lose the ship needed or don't get the upgrade, it allows you to progress and then you get stuck. Forcing the player to have to go back many missions, which sometimes don't autosave correctly (The last save in the mission can be in a very bad spot, not right at the start of the mission. Like when you are surrounded by enemies) - There are some seemingly built in tedium tasks. Most of the missions revolve around fighting over a space, then later fighting over that space again, and then again. In between the missions it will say, build up your forces. This essentially means, if you want the best ships click build and wait, sometimes taking 20 mins or so of just sitting there doing nothing. This really slogs the game, and when its assumed you need to just walk away and come back in 20 mins something is off - Bugs, bugs, and more bugs. There is a shocking amount of bugs for this being the final version of the game. The resource gathering mechanic being broken is pretty appaling to say the least, while not all missions require you to aquire resources some of the hardest missions do. The ships that gather resources will randomly (but consistently at least once every 5 mins) just stop, and start ramming eachother. I am guessing they are trying to mine resources from eachother, and the more miners you have the worse it gets forcing the user to say "drop resources" getting them to start the mining task over. - Another huge bug is the gravity drive/hyper space, every single mission after a certain period pathing seems to hit a critcal mass where both yours and enemy ships will start hyperspace jumping randomly everywhere. Sometimes its like they are running away or just flying off into nothingness. Sometimes you can use this to your advantage, as the trigger event for the next wave/sequence will be kill all enemies, so you can 'hold off' a wave with enemies just flying around randomly, but this is cheating persay (but sometimes i couldn't win without a break long enough to build some ships) and the fix can cause even more problems. I.e. to resolve this save the game and load the file, this forces all 'lost' enemies to b-line to where they were trying to go. This can help sometimes, but other times sends hundreds of ships that should have been coming in groups of 10 all at once to your base. To note this is triggered by loading a save file, so you can essentally break a mission if you got too far in the mission and died but due to the bug you need to start completely over because while technically you were doing OK it was 2 bugs that make it unwinnable (1st being ships getting lost, second being loading forcing them all to appear at your base at once) I really like this game personally, but as you can see from my review had some heartache getting through it. I unfortunetly couldn't recommend this to anyone because the learning curve is so high and trouble getting into it would shy away 95% of the population with all the bugs. Its telling that most of the achievements, especially the ones for winning the game have only been gotten by less than 1% of people who have the game. That all being said its a good game, and the dev (who did this solo) clearly spent alot of time on this creating a very unique experience. I would just say its not for most unfortunetly.

TL;DR: Atrocious controls, horrendous unit AI. I have tried this several times over the years, usually quitting on the same mission, the first one that pits you against a large force with a sizeable fleet of your own (capturing Petra and Nottingham). Now I realize (after trying it again and beating it) that the biggest obstacle was not the difficulty, but the atrocious controls and horrible unit behavior. You can't just order units to defend a position - they will aggro on something passing by and drift away, ultimately getting killed by the endlessly spawning waves of enemies. The game also uses localized resource system (aka each base gets its own resources), so you often have to transfer them. However, transport ships cannot figure out who is supposed to go where - I've seen them aimlessly warp around, and they get stuck as soon as they try to pick up resources in space. Same goes for ore gatherers - if you have 2 or more, the 2nd one will try to pick the rock the first one is holding, and they'll just get stuck - I've had that happen time and time again. Then you get to a mission where you're supposed to defend your base against waves of incoming enemies. The problem? They warp into the map, and then just warp off into the distance, never actually attacking your bases. And since they are apparently special, they can warp without having a destination object, so you can't catch up. After trying to chase those things for 40 minutes, I finally gave up again, for the final time, this time not because it was too hard, but because the game actively refuses to be actually played.

Another game in my library that I didn't know I owned and after will never play again.

Confuscius say bad controls make bad game. What a shame. Has a lot of promise.

I really wanted to like this game, but I couldn't get past the overly complex controls. There are so many cool things about it, so much that went into it, and if it were easier to control. Ship control mode is fun, tactical needs more right click context menus so you can set things moving. I must have started this up 7 or 8 times, remapped the controls, tried it again and again to wrap my mind around it, but it was just too clunky. If the developer made an update to the controls, I'd try it again, but currently it's not worth my time to try to wrap my head around the odd control schemes.

Atrocious controls. I love the art style and was really excited to play this, but it *feels* horrendous to actually play.

i though the reviews where harsh, but they are not, UI/controls is/are very confusing, there's SO many shortcuts i forgot my own name trying to memorize them. Enemy is brutal/unbalanced, in a sense that ur almost dead 90% of the time, and as some have pointed out, some missions depend on prior missions ships, which can make u get stuck because u didnt "play well enough" a previous mission, this is why games like warcraft I/II/III always started each mission with a pre-set number of units and not with the units u had last mission.... or why homeworld always lets u build first in every mission... RTS + first person view, the first person is pointless, i tried using it with small ships, tried using it with capital ships, it's all the same, there's no "you are better than the computer AI cuz ur flying it urself"... most of the times u will die and wasted precious time that you could have used to send re-inforcements or better place your ships or retreat.... im hoping void destroyer 2 was an upgrade on all this, i bough this on very heavy discount (around 1 dollar), otherwise i would of returned it... cheers

Void Destroyer is a hybrid RTS/space combat sim featuring cell shaded graphics. This is certainly a golden concept, so why did this game objectively fail to capture the market that games like Elite and Star Citizen show is ripe for the taking? The game itself seems much like a late beta product, with unpolished controls, a terrible control scheme, and quite a few other issues that render a great concept for a game into a sad and disappointing flop (as the sales and reviews here on the store show). This is a curious tale of how publication models like Steam's Early Access hurt games, gamers, developers and publishers all at once. The developer dumped the game on Steam through EA, kicked the can down the road for a while, harvested all the "early access" cash, slapped a "release" patch on it, then ran off to the next project without truly completing and polishing the game he was already working on that he'd taken money for but never fully delivered on. Without publishing models like Early Access, the developer would have been forced to actually finish and polish the game, wherein it would have been a tremendous success, a win for gamers, developers and publishers alike. But that's not what happened. The developer had the option, through Steam EA, to take a shadier route which resulted in the game failing, took the money and ran off to the next project, presumably to do the same thing all over again. Can we blame the developer for this shadiness? Not entirely. Sure, people who go into other peoples houses, take their wallets and run, these are surely bad people exploiting crimes of opportunity. But the people who allow this to happen, in this case Valve, are ultimately to blame. I do believe the developer at one point intended to make a great game here, but Early Access ironically killed it. But the developer is also culpable, as he's left this game up for sale for a whopping $14.50, as well as farming it out to every bundle pusher who'd take it, instead of removing it. He does however use the store updates page for this game to let people know he's repeating the same "Early Access" bait-and-switch with Void Destroyer 2.