İncelemeler

• gamedeal user

  Apr 3, 2016

  The core concept is great, and the ship creation system is one of the best I've seen. However, the game falls apart after that. The missions are short, boring, and frankly, annoying. The core mechanic is that you build a ship, do one mission, and then it gets taken away, and you have to build a new ship to do exactly one mission and then fight your old ship. Rinse, repeat...l I played long enough to know it wasn't worth $15 to me. This game could be great, if the linear mission system was stripped out and replaced with a sandbox world where you slowly acquire scrap and unlock upgrades to keep improving your ship. I'd play that game for hours.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 28, 2016

  I really wanted to like this game. I have an unhealthy love for building spaceships that blow each other up. The conceit, that the end boss of each level is your previous ship, is an awesome idea. Ultimately, though, I can't recommend it. First and foremost, you're continually fighting with the camera to see anything. The game automatically zooms in and out with the range to what it thinks is your target. Missions regularly zoom way out and away from the ship to show you new ships entering the mission, while sometimes also blinding you with a giant white "warp drive" flash- without pausing the game or restoring the camera to where it was when done. Secondly, the missions aren't very fun. They're constantly filled with very tightly-timed insta-fail conditions. Get used to restarting because something you were escorting got blown up or something you were chasing escaped. Combine this with the hostile camera and fidgity controls, and expect a lot of frustration. I assume this mission design is an attempt to help mix up the combat, which is somewhat limiting because the AI mostly seems to be limited to doing jousting-style weapon passes at you, but it's no fun at all. It also sometimes feels like completing mission objectives too promptly can render later mission objectives much harder by causing enemies to spawn near something you're defending sooner and closer. Finding the sweet spot between instant failure and failing the next objective because I succeeded too quickly isn't particularly fun- some events seem like they ought to occur at fixed times and distances instead of relative to the player's progress and position. Controls aren't great. Imagine steering a car with a keyboard where you can only turn the wheel as hard left or right as possible with nothing in between. Now imagine you're doing this while trying to shoot at targets under a tight time limit using a gun bolted to the front of your vehicle. Also, although a tractor beam mitigates this, you're trying to fly around and pick up items on the ground. All while also being under the constraints of the first two complaints: you're fighting the camera and racing instant-fail mission conditions. Another control issue is that the game also emphasizes using "manual control" to boost and repair components, but does a very bad job of making this manageable for all but the smallest ships, given that you've got the number keys and a relatively short scrollable list on the right side of the screen to select what you want to boost but a lot more than ten components and very little free time with which to micromanage. I see what they're trying to do, but a more classic guns/engines/shields/repair ship-wide boost probably would have been far more manageable. At a minimum, though, it needs better ways to display and select the components you can be boosting. The ship design itself is OK, although the game does a very poor job of explaining the mechanics. What's that green +125% aura parts get and under what circumstances do you get it? How is damage distributed when your ship gets shot? What's stability? Is there any reason not to just stack all of your parts that aren't armor on a block safely in the middle of your ship and then build a framework of armor around it? How can I tell if a weapon has any sort of firing arc, and how big that arc is? I've got figured out partial answers to most of these, but the game doesn't tell you much about the core bit of the game: ship building. The final fight mechanic is a bit undermined by bad controls and limited AI, but I still appreciate it because it forces you to design against two constraints- the requirements of the mission and the ship you last designed. This helps encourage you to avoid settling into a single design you use over and over a bit. Overall, this feels fix-able, but at the moment it's just not enjoyable. The camera, the controls, and the mission design all serve to undermine the core awesomeness of building and fighting with spaceships and against your own designs. I'm sad to be not recommending this game, because the concept is great, the genre is one I love, it's not terrible and irreparably flawed by any means, and the developer seems interested in soliciting feedback and making the game a better game. In its current state, however, I just can't recommend it.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 7, 2016

  This game has some good mechanics. I really enjoy the ability to create your own spacecraft and load it out with your own weapons. But it got old very quickly. If you’re not aware, the main principle of this game is to build a ship and control it though a mission, at the end of the mission you fight your own ship from the previous mission, only controlled by AI. Once you beat the mission, you lose your ship and the cycle begins anew for the next mission. This is the premise that caught my attention, I love ship building games, and the ship construction part of Defect is good fun. It seemed like a neat and novel idea to fight your own ship designs. The campaign is hard. I found myself failing the missions (very early game), over and over. I would try again with a different strategy only to have the same thing happen and to have to watch the same cut-scene repeatedly before once again ending in failure. It began to grind on me. Out of the 6 or 7 missions available, I was completely unable to finish any of them. I would try again and again and again, trying out different strategies and ship designs. It’s very frustrating, and makes it glaringly apparent how repetitive the game is. When I finally managed to complete one of the missions available, my ship was taken away I was presented with another two missions. The cycle started anew. “Unprecedented freedom of creation - Create the most powerful ship in the galaxy piece by piece, with more than 180 components available and many more to come.” Even if you try and unlock new ship parts by going back over previously completely levels, the same thing happens. You complete a mission you have already completed, and bam, ships gone, start over. As someone who likes building ships, the combination of repeated failures and completing old missions meant I was building ship after ship after ship, and boy did it get stale fast. Pieces unlock chronically slowly, meaning you’re using the same handful of pieces for the majority of missions. “Exploit your designs - Create the perfect design to complete the mission, but remember to build in a weakness you can exploit later when your crew inevitably turns against you.” The loss of your ship after every mission doesn’t add anything to the game, it’s just a gimmick. You can load up exactly the same ship design for the next mission. Considering how the game requires you to switch up your strategy so often, you would likely never be able to use the same ship twice anyway. I never found fighting my own ship designs difficult, the AI just drives straight towards your guns blazing at the end of each mission. The idea that you can build a ship to complete a mission, defeat the previous ship you built and still have room to adjust your design to make it easier for yourself next time is utterly laughable. I found I didn't have enough components or power early on to have the luxury of choice in the way I designed my ship. "Epic scale - Unlimited combinations available from tiny fighters up to battle stations the size of a small moon." I had so much trouble I actually went ahead and watched a video on shipyard construction made by the developer. It showed him making a goliath ship with masses of power available, which is what I wanted from this game, but to me, it would take another 10-30 hours of gameplay just to get to that stage. Despite all that, this game has a lot of potential. If parts unlocked much faster, you would have more choice in your ship designs and that, hopefully, would make things easier, more diverse and theoretically make it easier to make progress and have fun. At the moment though, for me, it's an exercise in futility.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 26, 2023

  Ded.