Recent reviews by Knowledge

If you haven't bought the game, I'll fill you in on why I've given it a thumbs down even after playing it for hundreds of hours.

1. When you start off the game, there is no explanation about what you are to do. You don't uncover this. There is no mission briefing. You don't customize your ship and then join some alliance battle against the evil tyrinoids. You are just able to go to a bulletin board and are presented with the following options...

A. Take these items to this starbase/planet base. I'll give you some money.
B. Take this secret message to this starbase/planet base. Don't get scanned. I'll give you some money.
C. Go kill this guy in this sector. I'll give you some money.
D. Go find me an item. I'll give you some money.
E. (Rarely) Go destroy something for me.

Choose an option and off you go. The game's physics are good, and the game engine is decent. You have a lot of variety in the way you can control your ship. Move vertical as well as horizontal, employ yaw, and zoom forward and backward. It's like most any space flight sim, except (And this is important) that here you will turn incredibly slow. "But hey man, this is space, shouldn't you be able to fire your thrusters and quickly spin on your axis to point the opposite direction?" Nope. Not here... By DESIGN you turn really slow. You CAN rotate and then pitch up or down to speed it up slightly, but it's still very slow and annoying; especially in combat. We might as well be flying bi-planes in WWI, because that's the flight model. Even when you have flight-assist turned off, your ship still slows down after you use boost. Why? While you can do a bunch of fancy things, like use your vertical rockets, yaw/pitch, and turbo boost to move things along, it's all purposely cumbersome to make up for the developer's inability to construct a combat system that would be (A) Fun (B) In Space.

2. When you decide on where you want to go (Via a couple decent vector maps that are easy to understand and use), and you leave the starbase you are at, you will point your ship at a dot in space, maximum thrust, and when you leave mass lock (Usually ten seconds) you can then engage your frameshift (warp) drive.

Unfortunately, you do not just warp to the system you are pointed at. Instead, you have to jump to each star-system along the way. For instance, to take the 2 boxes of tea to the starbase in Rygel 3, you'll need to make 8 jumps.

Each time you stop at a jump, inexplicably you appear on a direct course towards a star. So if you don't immediately steer out of the way, you'll crash out of warp, and start cooking. Every single time. EVERY TIME. Eight jumps, eight stars you have to steer away from. Zzz...

So, each time you are in a system, you have to fly away from the star so you don't overheat, and then can warm up your frameshift drive for another jump. This whole exercise takes about 30 seconds. Eight stops + 30 seconds. 4 minutes. Remember that... We're at 4 minutes.

Now, each time you reach a star, one of two events take place.

1. Someone will radio you a message that says, "Finally, I found you, follow me, I have important information for you."
2. Someone will radio you a message that says, "There you are, I've been waiting for you, all that tasty cargo."

Apparently pirates in space are waiting around to rob you of two boxes of tea. These messages are not varied much, and happen all the time. Every star you run across, you get one or the other, or both, or (If you've accepted a lot of missions) a whole bunch of them that say the same thing from different people.

If you follow the first guy, he basically exits warp, and invites you to stop and talk to him. You fly for about 5 minutes to his location. (9 minutes total now) When you get to him, he just tells you that he'll give you some cash to take the Tea to a different station. Why did he ask you to follow him? He could have just sent you the message when he sent you the greeting. Dumb. So you wasted five minutes. You then blow another 30 seconds engaging the frameshift drive. 9.5 minutes.

Now, at the second planet, you get to play the Interdiction game. Effectively, a tunnel has formed in front of you. It is moving all over the screen, and your job is to follow it with your reticle, so that it times out, and you escape. Otherwise, you can power down, or be forced, and enter space with a pirate who wants you to dump your cargo or die.

In most situations, either your frame shift drive will be cooling down for a few minutes while this guy attacks you with everything he has, or you'll be mass interrupted, which slows your frame shift drive warmup down. So you fight.

3. Combat... This is pretty much what you'd expect. You have beam weapons, missiles, frag cannons, mines, and a host of counter measures. Imagine playing a First Person Shooter. Imagine if the enemy was always behind you, shooting you in the back, but instead of being able to turn around and shoot back, you turn so slowly that the enemy is easily able to run behind you and shoot you in the back more. So only after doing a few cartwheels, and a barrelroll can you get the guy in your sites to fire at him a couple times before he's behind you again. Eventually it breaks down into whoever has the best countermeasures and shields, and has less to do with any kind of flight skill. If you are underpowered in your armaments (Which is the case early on) you'll run into guys you can't even penetrate their shields. And they'll destroy you. So you'll start back at the last starbase you were at, and likely go into debt paying for your new ship.

Combat can last a long time because it takes forever to line up your enemy. Figure ten to twenty minutes per fight unless you get blown apart early on or the enemy is really weak. Let's say 5.5 minutes average. You've now blown 15 minutes of your life, to start the game over.

Also, ammunition costs money. Let's say you defeat the enemy and you earn $18,000 for the kill bounty. (Not every kill gives you a reward.) Each torpedo in your torpedo launcher (Which can carry an amazing 2 torpedos in ammo total) is $15,000. So to restock two of them, the maximum you can carry. $30,000. Great... Also, some weapons are totally worthless. I won't get into that.

4. You arrive at the sector where your starbase is. It's a dot on the map. You might fly to it in about 3-5 minutes. But there are plenty of starbases far away, that you'll point your frameshift drive at it, and fly in a straight line for 20 minutes to 1.5 hours. That's right. You can watch an entire 90 minute movie before you get there. Fun!

5. You finally dock, and they give you some cash. Your selection of new missions can be found above in section 1. Same missions. You will repeat the above over and over again. Over and over and over again...

6. Horizons gives you a rover that you can drive around on a planet surface. There is nothing there. Literally. But you can drive around. Sometimes you can pick up rocks that you can't sell, but you can waste even more time turning them into something to give you a small edge in combat once. There is supposed to be more stuff coming out, I guess.

So you might ask, why then did you play this game so much? I fell for all the praise this game has gotten, over finding black-holes (Boring black space in front of you, not even the lens effect going on), landing at star bases with their own factions and events (Same five models used over and over again.) and combat being great. It's not.

It's just not fun. It could be. But right now, it isn't.

You either like Tower Defense games, or you don't. Personally, I enjoy them as a quick pick-up game that involves a little strategy. It's like building something up as a defense system, and then seeing it if works out. Defense Grid does exactly what I want. It allows me to work on the defense building, while the game unleashes havoc on the hoardes of invading bugs.

There is nothing here that hasn't been done a million times already, but it does it in style and it looks great. It has a great interface and is easy to pick up and play. All around, this is a good game. It's not Skyrim or anything, but it's good for what it is is. A top notch tower defense game.