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I decided to take a risk on this game (it is not that expensive and seemed to be pretty interesting). Overall, it looks very promising, but it still feels a little unfinished.
The game is a simplified top down RTS, it has no active resource collection and also requires no real micro of your units. The map is a series of nodes, where you start at one point and the aim is to get to the final battle and win it. All the nodes in between serve as encounters, where you generally fight a bunch of enemy ships and upon winning receive the rewards. Some maps have the nodes in a fairly linear style other maps can even have you pretty much starting next to the end zone. This can even make it a little confusing for a beginner, as your end goal is simply presented as a mission, on my first game, I warped in there and was wiped out within seconds. However, this is a rogue-like and restarting due to mistakes can be expected.
Being a little more prepared, I started over and went through the selection of my ship and building the basic modules for it. The ship management is fairly straightforward, however, there are also elements that are not clearly explained. For instance, there are 4 green squares next to the layout of your ship, this is where you can carry extra modules around with you. Under that are 4 red squares, I found out after a little while of wondering where my modules were going, these were jettison squares for when you warp out, objects placed in them will not be taken with you. The confusion also lies with the ship modules being colour coded red and green, I thought the green squares were for holding defensive modules and the red squares for holding offensive not firing them off into space.
In terms of the battles they are also fairly simple affairs, simply double tap where you want your ship to go. A lot of the time, movement is not really that necessary. You can click on enemies to focus your weapons on them, but quite often you do not need to do very much. Maneuvering can be useful if you have point defense with a limited radius and you need to position your ship so it will shoot down incoming rockets.
Generally each node will be a random enemy encounter, there is the occasional Spacestation and sometimes an escort mission. However, there is very little beyond that. This is why it seems a little unfinished, the game could offer a lot more, but all the gameplay systems in the game seem to be barebones.
I look forward to playing it some more, only about an hour played, it is fairly relaxing to play, but I am not sure it requires a lot of skill.
At the moment I would like to see the following adaptions :
* Make the starmap more interactive. Enemy ships do move around, so there is obviously the idea that the map is a little more living than say in a game like FTL or Out There. Having resource or bonus generators to capture and defend could be a start, they could be defended by enemy bases and you may have to warp back to prevent raiders from disabling them.
* There needs to be more encounters than just straight up fights and escort missions. Try to make a little more story through aliens and events.
* Balance of fighting and movement seems non-existent. I can just hop around nodes and regenerate fighters as I want. There should be more emphasis on making me think where I am travelling to (a hop costs resources) or whether I keep pumping out fighters to certain doom (I haven't tried hard difficulty, maybe it is in there?).
* Module damage would be good, getting guns knocked out, or being able to aim for specific enemy modules would add more to the battles.
* Activatibles with maybe some skillshots would make the battles more interactive. Either through installing modules on the ship or maybe making it something you can level up. However, it does not need to be a Starcraft 2 clickfest, this is a touchscreen game. However, maybe some skills that you can activate like shield repels or speed boosts or stun/emp shots would make it a little more hands on.
Overall I like the game, I think for 4 euro's it is reasonably priced, but it could do with being a little more polished and having some more meat to it. I think you could then consider charging a little more for it. At the moment, it seems to be a basic build.
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Many choose not to pay at all and instead simply download a cracked version of Battlestation: Harbinger. This is hurting us immensely and makes it very difficult to make more Battlestation games, we simply cannot do it without funding...