XO

I'll split this review to what I enjoyed and what I did not. What I enjoyed 1) You really get the feeling of trying to build together a rag-tag fleet of military and civilian ships, fleeing away from a seemingly unstoppable enemy while building up your arsenal, firepower and the capacity to support your fleet. Awesome feeling. :) 2) Lots of interesting concepts, boarding, resource harvesting, different kinds of weapons to counter different enemies. Really enjoyed different weapons, upgrades, ship types, keeping civilians in cargo holds (then performing a crew transfer to abandoned/disabled ships) and the ability build up my fleet. :D 3) Lots of events, cool interactions with other factions and even within your own fleet. I like how as your fleet gets bigger coupled with a mix of different factions together, tensions begin building and technical problems arise. It really gives me the feeling (to point 1) that as I start accumulating a bigger fleet, the logistical and social challenges of being in space too long starts to kick in. :DD What I did not enjoy 1) Overall, the difficulty curve is too high in its current state. The game is punishing with the reputation system, combat, resource gathering, fleet build-up and preparation for the final sector. The slightest mistake may force you to restart midway through the game. Some examples: - Had a Imperial strike force jump in, dived straight for my convoy of civilian ships, began blasting missiles and boarding parties everywhere. Before my military ships could blast the enemy ships down, they had already disabled a bunch of civilian ships, some of which were important 'farmships' which essentially rendered my fleet inoperable at that stage of the game. Furthermore, my reputation plummeted due to disabling/destroying my ships so all the factions were hostile to me after... - Was friendly with most factions, game was going well. Made 1 slip with choices causing the Irenic to have negative reputations towards me. Jumped to the sector gateway controlled by Irenic. They hailed me and said that my reign of terror must end. Charges towards my fleet of military ships in which my main battleship was low hp from previous engagements. Main battleship got destroyed almost instantly... :'( 2) Unable to explore the unique concepts offered due to time constraints from the Harvesters. - There's a lot of ship types, weapon systems, upgrades, etc that the game provides which I enjoy exploring and trying. But most times, I'm rushing to quickly try and complete quests, plot jumps, sort ships, gather resources, transfer crew to new ships, defending against enemy ships to be able to fully appreciate all these content. - While I enjoy new content being added, it can't replace the Harvesters arriving too quickly before I have the chance to explore all these. Also, I don't get access to some interesting ships/abilities until the late game where its too late to really maximize the use of these additional utilities. At this stage, with me barely supporting the fleet coupled with facing some tough enemies and lack of resources, I don't have enough time to leverage my new ships/abilities to its full potential. Random Misc (For Devs to fix) 1) There's a bug in a quest where the Rovers ask you to save their children and there's no other options to proceed. You only have the option to keep asking them about what's going on, and they tell you that the Empire's involved or something... 2) Sometimes, when you select the 'skip' conversation option when conversing with your 'Pact' folk at the first sector gate, the gate will still be locked permanently. PS: I tried - Jumping out and back into the system and even blowing up our own 'Pact' ally station but gate still locked which prevents you from continuing - Came back after the Harvesters took over the system, blew up their station and gate still locked so yeah... Some suggestions could be to put a difficulty bar which controls the speed of the Harvesters and the frequency of good events. Maybe also give the civilian ships more health and not 1 hp. That way, a single stray laser, missile or boarding party won't immediately disable half of the civilian flotilla and essentially forcing a restart. Overall, I enjoyed my time with XO and may change my recommendation once further updates have been made to the game to address some of the points I listed above. Good game, nice concept and good sci-fi feel.

So, I saw this game ages ago on Many a True Nerd's channel and thought it looked cool and picked it up just to see if it was fun to actually play with the idea I could just refund it if I didn't like it. well I got sucked in. I sat down for a look before making dinner and 2 hours later my partner came in asking when dinner was going to be read. I had completely lost track of time. It is an interesting take on the FTL concept with a focus on political factions in a divided failing universe being hounded by the an unknown force called the Harvesters. The game play I interesting with some fun orbital physics as you battle against time to rescue and mediate with all those in your path trying to get to the safe haven away from the Harvesters. The look is fun, very 80's space movie wire frame I thought it would get annoying but the clear colours and designs of the ships make it clear what is going on ant any time. Looking forward to seeing how the development will go. In its current state there is a full game here. Some minor things have annoyed me like the way 'formations' are unclear as to if your ships are going to move to the potions you have selected but I'm sure that will be cleared up in later updates.

This game is effectively a larger-scale 3D version of FTL: Faster than Light. Like FTL, you start out with the bare minimum and must reach a particular destination while being pursued by a relentless enemy. Unlike FTL, you can (and are heavily encouraged to) build up a fleet consisting of anything from warships to food factory ships. That leads into logistical issues that FLT doesn't have - you also have to manage water supplies among your fleet to prevent riots breaking out, and your fleet may be comprised of ships from five factions that do not like each other. Definitely worth buying.

The game focuses way too hard on pushing you to the next system. You're encouraged to hail every ship you see, but the game then heavily punishes you for daring to engage with its content by warping in a fleet of absolutely massive ships you'll never be able to beat. There is also a major focus on resource management, but being able to attain these resources is entirely based on RNG: whether you get the right kind of ship to get that resource, and if the planet you warp to actually has it for the ship to even gather. There's not a lot of room for skill when it's entirely based on luck of finding the right ship, and if you try to explore to find the right planet and hail ships the Harvesters will catch up to you. The game says you can't hope to save EVERYone, but I found I didn't have the time to save ANYone. Overall the game is way too fast paced and luck based for me, and no options to change it. If there was an option to make the Harvesters move a lot slower or only have them expand when you jump to a new system... giving you time to actually play the game I think I'd enjoy it a lot more.

6+ years of development just to make Worse FTL, and I *still* haven't gotten my backer OST either, except for one single "sneak peek" posted on the composer's bandcamp page, which actually gets me a bit angry since the OST is the best thing about XO. When it was pitched, it originally felt very much like a Homeworld/FTL crossover. Procedural universe fleeing from an implacable enemy, collecting resources and crew along the way to prepare for a climactic showdown somewhere at the end, but it would also have RPG elements! You'd have tons of support ships and there'd be fleet politics! Instead it feels like we've just gotten FTL But Worse. Less options, less detail, randomness even more aggressive(at least in FTL you could still rely on being able to collect at least *some* trade resources without being lucky and acquiring the Trade Resource Getter ship in the first region of the game, but even then you also need the Trade Resource Carrier ship to pop up somewhere or you'll be unable to buy anything once you hit the second region as prices inflate insanely quickly). There are also meant to be some sort of factional relations, but 90% of the time it feels like hostile-marked ships just saunter off or hang around their own part of the orbit rather than actually acting on their hostility. The art style is nice, but the presentation always makes it feel like a struggle to get every element of a system that I want to watch in view at the same time. I'm not sure if it's an issue with a very cramped field of view angle or what. A good few interactions also feel like they rely on just a few clicks too many or needing to work in un-intuitive ways(for instance, to move a ship you don't just select the ship then right-click a place to go. you select the ship, right-click the ship, choose the move command and then left-click where you want them to go. Why?). Basic combat orders also seem to be missing or obfuscated. For instance, lasers can shoot down missiles, but only if they're done charging and fire while the missile is in flight. Why is there no option to mark a weapon as a point-defense weapon that holds its charge for use against enemy projectiles? Or if there is, why is it apparently hidden so well that I can't spot it? The crew system also contributes a lot to intolerable levels of randomness. The way you get new ships is three-fold. Either they choose to join you(because a convo option succeeded for ??? reasons that are never explained), you board them(which sometimes makes them join you, sometimes just makes them go rogue and leave? Again, not really explained when which option happens) or you crew an abandoned ship(the only reliable way). But when crewing ships, there are five types of crew, and you need the right kind of crew. It's not a matter of Pact crew getting bonuses on Pact ships, for instance, which would be fine, but just that the game goes "lol, sux 2 b u" if you find a sweet Rover ship that you lack a Rover crew for. There isn't even any option to, as far as I can tell, strip un-capturable ships for their gear or melt them down for resources. It's just one of your (limited) system visits wasted. Sometimes the game tells me that the bridge crew disapproves of something I did which is... okay? Does that matter anything? I can't tell. I know the game was promised to have INTERNAL POLITICS but they never seem to really make themselves felt if they're implemented at all. I'm not sure if this game is mislabelled and really should be version 0.44 rather than 1.44, but it feels like a lot of stuff that should be abstracted is detailed and a lot of stuff that should be detailed is abstracted, which is a shame. I wouldn't really recommend this. Probably buy the OST if it ever comes out, though.

I love this game. It makes you feel like you're in an old-school science fiction movie, fighting impossible odds to save the last of humanity. It's freaking hard to begin with, and there's lots to juggle. Like a lot of great games of this type, early and often use of the PAUSE key and game speed adjustments help a lot. When it kicks your butt it's often telling you that you didn't pay enough attention a couple jumps ago. The game's designed well and you don't spend all your time hunting for hidden controls. New ideas and events and items are usually introduced well. NPC dialog helps explain things, but you can skip it once you understand what's going on. Like FTL, the game encourages replay and optimization. It's constantly giving you difficult command tradeoffs. Should I take a risk to get that extra water ship, or just jump away? Should I save this civilian ship, even though it will piss off my current allies? Sometimes the green wireframe effect makes it hard to focus on the right parts of the UI. Sometimes I wish it weren't lurking there always in my computer. "Come on, try again," it says. "Maybe you'll be a bit lucky, AND make all the right decisions this time." I can tell it still wants to kill me.

Battlestar Galactica the game. I love the constant idea of being on the run which this game provides, and who the moment you think you're safe everything goes wrong. Don't play this game if you have a short temper, and be okay to lose. It's all in the fun.

i paid $10 into the kickstarter for this game back in 2015 because a friend posted it on facebook and the concept sounded cool. i think the game went up on steam early access in 2019 but i figured i'd rather play a finished gamed. did not expect it to take this long. seems like it is still actually in early access, but the most recent updates imply it won't be for much longer? anyway, I think I played one or two games in the beginner mode, without getting past the first sector. then i did games on normal difficulty. i would restart when anything went really wrong here or even sometimes when i figured out a new mechanic that changed the way i wanted to play the game. thus, i beat the finale on my first run where i got past sector 3. for me, the fun here was in playing through all the different events, finding new and cool ships, and figuring out how they could work well together. i liked being a solemn space captain trying to save as many people as possible, and deciding when to be ruthless for the greater good of humanity (which at the end of the day really just meant hijacking every single destroyer i saw). i like the real-time aspect of the game, as it makes it impossible to really get bogged down. you just fly to a planet, interact with all the stuff around the planet as quickly as possible, see what cool new ships or items you get, and move on. i like the economic mechanic where the ability to collect ore, the ability to store ore, and the ability to spend ore are all simultaneously unreliable and need to be built around. at the end, i rolled up on the final battle with 5-10 destroyers, 2 or 3 of which were being controlled by my marines under duress, in a fleet of a little over 30 ships. they crushed the final battle militarily (just 1 frigate was lost i think), but eventually the harvesters got into about half of my civilian fleet, so i only rescued like 10,000 people. i'd say that during these runs i found inventory management a bit frustrating. a lot of time was spent moving items around between cargo ships. i worried about water management a lot with all the people i was saving, and always had to have one cargo ship full of people ready to send away if things got too bad. the ui in general could probably be improved, though i do quite like the look of the game. maybe my computer is just kind of sluggish. the combat is also very basic -- really only a few things you need to know: keep your fighting ships together, keep your civilian ships somewhere else, have marines ready to board anything strong and know how to bait out the weapons so they don't hit the boarding craft, have range 4+ weapons for the final boss. i also think some of the storytelling could be better. to what degree are all these intertwined factions related to one another? why do you just jump for 5 sectors, find a big enemy thing at the end, and then jump beyond it to end the game? like how do they beat you to the final rendezvous, what was that area supposed to be, and why had no one ever explored beyond it before? i also expected there to be more intra-fleet political management, and there is clearly a half-baked system there with the game tracking relations between all the non-pact factions, but i don't think it ever really had any practical implications to my games, and did not show itself at all in most games. next i gave it a go on master difficulty. at this point i was past roleplaying and looking much more strictly at gaming the mechanics of the game. basically on master, you want to make friends with at least one faction as fast as possible, so you fly around avoiding pact systems because they have no good industry ships and can't help you make good friends, and then once you have allied someone, go to as many of their planets as possible for free ships. you really don't care about military ships early because they all have low-damage weapons and until the final boss you mostly want to avoid fights. especially in master, there are a lot of cases where a winnable fight should be avoided just because you are on a short clock and it would take to long to do it and clean up after before the harvesters show up. then moreso in sector 3 and especially in 4 and 5, pact worlds become good again because you just want as many destroyers as you can get, and free ones are nice. i had 5 going into the final battle, which, with a few other combat ship, was enough to win, but this time i lost my whole civilian fleet and only made it out with like 6 ships. interestingly, i had no problems with water or inventory management in master mode. i think on the one hand there is just no time to shuffle things around, so you just lose ships instead of finding the cargo ship that has the nanobots to heal them, and, even though you are visiting fewer planets in total, something in the game engine is pretty good about giving you the same number of farm ships, so you mostly have excess water. going to each planet and seeing what ships it would net me remained pretty addicting in master mode, and it was cool to see what directions my fleet comp would go in each run based on who i made friends with most quickly. the fleet that made it to the end was mostly empire with a bit of corp mixed in. anyway, i don't think i will play this again, but i got 30 hours out of it in the course of a week. if you are looking at steam reviews you probably play all kinds of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. this one is a bit different so give it a whirl.

I will use BSG analogies so I understand it [+] easy to understand and play [+] realistic economics and fleet tactics [+] Cylons are well programmed [+]immersive experience [-] Cylons do not give you time to prepare, [-] Cylons jump to the system around day 10 [-] Cylons use tactics almost impossible to use unless you have 2 capital ships

This game has a promising future but there are a few key issues at times. The updates do add more to the game and there is progress but it kinda feels as if you are stuck babysitting the most incompetent people in the entire galaxy. The factions you have to deal with apart from the harvesters make you question if whether or not you should actively cheer on the destruction of the entire galaxy or prevent it. I would hold off on buying the game right now until they release more patches on the factions to make them follow more logical reasoning instead of the "Oh no you didn't bend over backwards to help me at the cost of your own well being? That's it our entire petty and vindictive faction will now be hostile towards you from now on.". Another big issue I have with the game is the lack of an in game encyclopedia on the start menu. There is no learning from whatever item you just grabbed and having any general idea how x and y work without having to go through it manually. Would be useful to know what stats also do on weapons and being able to read up on how each item works out of game instead of going through the tutorial again. Tldr: Wait for more updates before buying the game.