Customer Reviews

Space Force: Rogue Universe

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This game is quite enjoyable if you like the idea of being dropped into a universe with 40+ huge sectors that you can explore. I've played so far for 20+ hours as a trader. The RPG aspects are great as you pick and choose the areas of your ship you wish to level up, such as shield, speed, jammer, cargo space, etc. Also depending upon your occupation you can have up to 3 wingmen which allows you to do some of the harder missions, such as destroying buildings (in space). I've never seen a game implement a better use of using the mouse to fly and for combat. I've played everything from X3 to Freelancer but this is clearly the best. No joystick is necessary. I've got close to 100,000 credits in the bank from steady trading between various systems and trading with trade ships. Now I can buy a fighter craft which can be upgraded to higher levels than my trading ship. The graphics are awesome. I've played on my 46 inch plasma at 1024 x 768 and the game looks awesome. X3 was way to boring and the pace was too slow, Freelancer was fun, but exploring was restricted. This game is the best of both worlds. And if you like Space Rangers 2 (a 2D game), this is as close as you can get to Space Rangers 2, and have full 3D. Sure the manual is minimal but it's still covers all the basic stuff. Now go have some fun people!

Also let me add that after another additional 10 hours of play I'm still having a blast. I enjoy how enemy ship's of various races in the game have differing attack techniques. I also like how news of conflicts in various sectors is actually happening in real time. Since I'm playing the free roam mode not the story mode this adds a nice touch to the game. I can now find more battles if that is what I seek.

Personally I also like the fact that dogfights take a bit longer and really do require more technique than just lock and load. For instance if you shoot your missles while you have your afterburners going your missles move toward the target at greater speed.

Also having wingmen of differening races is also fun, because the race of your wingman may be in conflict with a race you are not in conflict with, which means you have to be quite careful when entering new sectors.

Overall this game is great. Feels dynamic as promised which really makes it worth it. Now I'm playing the actual game not the demo. No patch has been released yet. But I've only had 1 crash in 20+ hours (on windows xp) so bugs must be minimal.

I like this game because it emmerses me into a universe that is both unfamiliar and beautiful. I am a sci-fi buff anyway so they go hand in hand. It is graphically intense so be prepared with a good system. Go for the 1 gb gpu you have been watching, my 512gb card works but load times are sometimes long.

The controls did not automatically pick up my joystick but it was easy to program it in. Unlike freelancer, that is not intended for joysticks, incase anyone is wandering, the joystick works very well with this game.

The free will acspect is not at all exaturated. While there is a story line, you are in no way controlled by it. There is no way to "fail a mission". If you blow up the wrong guy, his buddies will try to get you and your diplomicy with that race goes down.

You can mine to earn money and to upgrade your ship. Alot like work at times. But it adds to the reward when you finally get the fast and ferocious ship of your dreams.

Trading can be much more lucritive but finding the trade route among so many different systems is proving to be an ultimate challenge. Oh and don't get blown up with precious cargo, you can come back, but your cargo wont.

The only con is that there is not interation outside the space ship. Maybe next time. Untill than, lets build a better ags!

Wow, here I am taking my flight test, and wham, who would have thought... pirates appear. So, where's the troll guarding the bridge? You couldn't have thought of something actually original?

And man o man is it that hard to find people that speak English clearly and can give the thing some sincere emotion?

After sitting through a horrendous intro movie...

The game runs fine, no glitches, no problem at all with all settings on high. Unless of course I take into account actual visual content... because no matter how much MIP mapping, vertex shading, or how many anisotropic milkshakes you throw at a cow, it is, unavoidably just a cow.

The `blurry radar' I don't like at all. One of the primary functions of a HUD is clarity and the communication of absolute situation awareness. The radar pips are blurry, unclear and having to switch between modes to distinguish between ships and buildings is silly. When different colors or icons would do. Instead of those ball-lighting blobs.

The textures on some of the buildings is horrendous. The bump mapping is WAY too high. It looks as if the buildings were exposed to 3000 years of meteor bombardment. Space age modern tech doesn't require stone bump mapping, sorry.

The voice acting is the worst I've ever heard in the genre! get some professional voice actors, ones that can actually give a sentence more inflection and emotion than R2D2.

The character visuals are no more than plastered image of a pilot, totally devoid of any lip & head movements. Heck even Wing Commander had more life-infused people in the game.

The trading system is horrible, no real value in trading since I can just blow up pirates, sell the goods, rinse repeat.

Missions are poorly written, simple go here kill that and activate satellite 1, 2,3, fun... NOT!

I want to turn off all the radio chatter, I want to shut down the stupid robot chick that is constantly talking to me, I want to use widescreen graphics with clear type.. unfortunately I can't do any of this.

Docking... oh wow... 1.) approach base 2.) When icon appears hit 'Enter'... Geez, that is way too difficult for me! GIVE-ME-A-BREAK!

Provox released a demo reel that contained fantastic visuals... too bad I see none of that while in the actual game.. oh well.

No other piece of software has let me down as much as this in my 20+ years of computer gaming experience. Now I appreciate all the other space game titles a lot more!

So, in spite of what some FANBOYS would like you to believe about Spaceforce.. DON'T!

I am coming mainly from the demo and some from the previous commenter. The game has very good graphics and a music score which gets redundant after 10 hours of play. It looks better then X-Reunion but may not play better.

You do more flying around then interesting activities. Provox should have provided interplanetary jump capability to anywhere within 50,000 miles or so. the need a better orientation system on the HUD. Currently you have to enable the grid on screen and callup the map, cumbersome.

There are some other irritating things like targeting lock and fighting around stations. If you fire too close to a station it will retaliate and end the conflict right there. Stations should have shielding that can handle stray firing that doesn't match what meteor showers can do.

Some of the quests are overwhelming and others don't make sense. They don't seem to offer enough credits for the trouble. The trading with cargo ships seems like what you get from the station. I have not explored that option much, like maybe for the narcotics contraband you get from pirate conquests you might get a good deal for needed items.

Two irritating things get my head banging on the keyboard.
1) Meteor showers that you can't seem to outrun or jump away from except to the station.
2) The ship constantly degrades on durability and constantly needs repair of that, especially from shield failure and meteor showers! As it degrades your ship's performance will suffer. I don't know if upgrading shield or armor will fix that.

I don't know about the other character profiles but the best choice was Soldier. Otherwise at the opening fight I would get creamed almost every time.

Getting enough upgrades for reasonable credits seems to take forever. You get biggest pay from quests. Second best is pirate hunting, but after a while pirates can be hard to find. If you upgrade your energy cells to 20% you can mine and harvest floating scrap. Cycle radar for different scan modes. And that is the only way you can find the parts for the time and cloak technology. But you don't get much for your efforts. This makes the game tedious.

It would be nice to be able to land on planets to explore or mine.

If your lucky you can get or find a snip tool that enhances your turbo gun about 3x. You can take down your enemies quite effectively and forget about the missiles. But it does fire more slowly.

The message center is a joke. Why couldn't you get useful messages like pirate sightings or other useful intel.

Not having any guides other then the AI makes the game frustrating and tedious. Why produce a game without a manual or help interface, except for that nagging AI?

The politics is complicated and adds to the complexity of the game. The story line is poor, and they mix it in with the major quests.

If Provox can fix those discrepancies then perhaps they will have decent game. As of now I won't buy it. I have all kinds of suggestions how they could make the game better

Found, basic novice manual:
spaceforce-game.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=1057

The best game I played to date is Comanche 4. Decent graphics and game play.

sounded like a good game but for some reason my computer has a hard time running it, that and the fact that i can't see the stations i'm trying to dock at make it less fun than it sounded. I do not know if this is just a game glitch or just a problem with my graphics card.

been having alot of fun just playing as a fighter upgrading every thing possible to get better stuff and the areas in all the sections are huge to say the least. good game lots of things to do

A wasted opportunity. "It could have been a champion."

Pro: Amazing potential

Con: Provox hired a incompetent and zero-experience novice to do the high-level game design, destroying the game in the process.

It's just criminal to take a game with so much potential and just torpedo it in such an obscene manner. What's really amazing is how much effort went into the game on the basic stuff -- engine, art, etc. -- and how little effort went into directing this to a great gaming experience. In the grand scheme of things, it takes relatively little money to hire a good writer/designer, compared to the rest of the investment. If only they had done that, this game would absolutely sing. As it is, it sinks like a stone.

The game really does not play well. There's a lot of unpolished and apparently untested aspects of the game. For instance navigation is very difficult/tedious. You cannot set waypoints or ride in tradelanes, autopilot doesn't work, and it takes like 5-10 minutes (in real time) for the jump drive to recharge. So traveling from point A to point B is about as tedious as sitting there watching a large file download from the internet.

It's difficult to believe that the game was betatested before it was released. The assumption would be that the publisher rushed the game towards the end, but that doesn't explain the horrible choices they made about the writing. Being rushed doesn't imply that you'll hire somebody who is horribly underqualified and incompetent.

They hired an incompetent 19-year-old student with zero experience to do the entire mission design and writing. He did even worse than you'd imagine. Here's the mission outline for the first two missions of the main campaign:

Mission 1:
Perform a dogfight against two ships. (highly difficult)
Perform a "scan" five times in a row. (highly tedious)

Mission 2:
Perform a dogfight against one ship.

Yes, that's it. Zero thought went into this. I'm not even going to get started on how bad the writing is. As another reviewer said, "A Saturday morning cartoon looks like Hamlet in comparison with the story." (Brett Todd -- gamesradar.com)

There's no tutorial of any kind, and learning how to deal with the command interface is awkward. And even once you get good at it, it's still awkward. For instance, every time you tractor in some goods (from a kill), you have to go to the inventory menu to select which ones you'll keep. There's no way to select "take all" by default. So every single kill essentially requires a tedious menu to deal with.

Some may believe that a patch will fix major problems, but the major problems are so major that this is exceedingly unlikely. They would have to rewrite the entire campaign, for example. That's not something one can simply patch.

The game is badly balanced. On discussion boards everywhere people are complaining that it's really difficult to win the very first battle. This is because the developers didn't try to make the game playable, let alone enjoyable. (From a game-design point of view, the first mission is supposed to show you how to play the game; it's not supposed to be a highly difficult trial.)

From a "bare simulation" point of view, the game is playable, and a patch might even make it enjoyable in a very limited sense, although the stuff that *badly* needs fixing will never be fixed by a patch.

But even if the game becomes playable, I recommend boycotting the game. Developers need to learn that it's not cool to destroy a game with so much potential. -- That post-purchase concerns like "fun" are as important as pre-purchase advertising. The writer needs to be fired immediately. And the person who hired him needs to be shot at dawn.

Do not even consider buying this game until you have tried the demo! You'll easily see from the demo how badly the game is designed.

The game didn't work right in my system. I had all the system requirements yet the graphics were all screwed up, you couldn't see the game when you played it! Bad business, fast delivery but bad product!

This game is poorly made, improperly documented and plays like junk. I can't say enough bad things about this game.
I have played many space fighter games in my day and this is the worst!
Buy X2 or TARR Chronicles, both are superior games and worth the money spent on them.

A wasted opportunity. "It could have been a champion."

Pro: Amazing potential

Con: Provox hired a incompetent and zero-experience novice to do the high-level game design, destroying the game in the process.

It's just criminal to take a game with so much potential and just torpedo it in such an obscene manner. What's really amazing is how much effort went into the game on the basic stuff -- engine, art, etc. -- and how little effort went into directing this to a great gaming experience. In the grand scheme of things, it takes relatively little money to hire a good writer/designer, compared to the rest of the investment. If only they had done that, this game would absolutely sing. As it is, it sinks like a stone.

The game really does not play well. There's a lot of unpolished and apparently untested aspects of the game. For instance navigation is very difficult/tedious. You cannot set waypoints or ride in tradelanes, autopilot doesn't work, and it takes like 5-10 minutes (in real time) for the jump drive to recharge. So traveling from point A to point B is about as tedious as sitting there watching a large file download from the internet.

It's difficult to believe that the game was betatested before it was released. The assumption would be that the publisher rushed the game towards the end, but that doesn't explain the horrible choices they made about the writing. Being rushed doesn't imply that you'll hire somebody who is horribly underqualified and incompetent.

They hired an incompetent 19-year-old student with zero experience to do the entire mission design and writing. He did even worse than you'd imagine. Here's the mission outline for the first two missions of the main campaign:

Mission 1:
Perform a dogfight against two ships. (highly difficult)
Perform a "scan" five times in a row. (highly tedious)

Mission 2:
Perform a dogfight against one ship.

Yes, that's it. Zero thought went into this. I'm not even going to get started on how bad the writing is. As another reviewer said, "A Saturday morning cartoon looks like Hamlet in comparison with the story." (Brett Todd -- gamesradar.com)

There's no tutorial of any kind, and learning how to deal with the command interface is awkward. And even once you get good at it, it's still awkward. For instance, every time you tractor in some goods (from a kill), you have to go to the inventory menu to select which ones you'll keep. There's no way to select "take all" by default. So every single kill essentially requires a tedious menu to deal with.

Some may believe that a patch will fix major problems, but the major problems are so major that this is exceedingly unlikely. They would have to rewrite the entire campaign, for example. That's not something one can simply patch.

The game is badly balanced. On discussion boards everywhere people are complaining that it's really difficult to win the very first battle. This is because the developers didn't try to make the game playable, let alone enjoyable. (From a game-design point of view, the first mission is supposed to show you how to play the game; it's not supposed to be a highly difficult trial.)

From a "bare simulation" point of view, the game is playable, and a patch might even make it enjoyable in a very limited sense, although the stuff that *badly* needs fixing will never be fixed by a patch.

But even if the game becomes playable, I recommend boycotting the game. Developers need to learn that it's not cool to destroy a game with so much potential. -- That post-purchase concerns like "fun" are as important as pre-purchase advertising. The writer needs to be fired immediately. And the person who hired him needs to be shot at dawn.

Do not even consider buying this game until you have tried the demo! You'll easily see from the demo how badly the game is designed.