I put in almost 250 hours in less than a month, I got all 8 Characters to level 50 in about 2 weeks which is the max level.
I grinded way too many hours in a day. And as an Early Access game there wasn't much to do but grind the 2 game modes with the same maps over and over, just killing waves of Dino's. And i dealt with many annoying bugs.

One day I was playing on a Survival mode server, Survival mode is where you kill a large wave of Dino's and the next wave difficulty increases. The game ends if the Dino's damage the "Harvester" and you don't heal it back to full hp within 2 minutes, at 0:00 it's game is over.

Well the server got bugged and the game wouldn't end, this had happened once before, 10 days earlier and I left the server and reported it on Steam. This time I developed an uncontrollable urge to see how far I could go, I had hoped to make it to wave 50 and quit.

I ended up spending 11 hours on the server while many other players came and went. By wave 60 I was dead tired and decided to finally give up. I am not going to argue that I wasn't exploiting a bug, but I didn't really feel bad because in survival you don't really get gear drops and I was max level so I didn't get XP either.

I also told people on Discord channel that my server bugged.

So I get called out on the Steam Discussion and everyone that I hadn't already told, gets told I was "exploiting" a server bug. People look at me as if I was just some cheater who got "caught". And people started making claims and spreading lies.

I get accused by the Dev of leveling my Characters to 50 too fast. He claimed he as a Dev has tools to cheat and he can't level that fast or some nonsense.

People called him on his BS but others supported his claim that I somehow cheated to gain all my levels, anyway he wiped all my characters back to level 1.

I felt the punishment was too much but mostly i didn't appreciate being accused of not earning all my levels.
I continued to support this game, I had no intention of playing but i wanted to support the game and the community.

Which seems to be a strange notion to some people, Iv'e stuck around game communities while I have quit/taken long breaks before.

A few days later Activision claimed stolen assets were used in the game. I continued to support the Dev and the Game and spoke out in support.

He created an Indigogo Campaign and offered the Elite pack to anyone who Contributed $25.

I contributed and figured once I got Elite I'd come back to the game.That might be enough for me to start all over.

After days of promises of keys being sent out he gave everyone a refund but no keys. I have lost all faith in this game and the Dev.

I have taken down all my Video guides and edited a thread I had made in another games forum where I urged people to buy this game.

So I do NOT recommend this game.

I really did once support this game and its developers. It's true, read my old Prelude review, it's still positive. I was heavily invested in Trek Industries' first title, Orion Prelude, having unlocked 99% of its achievements. I was happy to see an expansion of the Orion universe away from the limits imposed by Prelude's systems, and it's always nice to see indie devs improve upon their vision of an ideal game.

The game itself is not bad, per se. It has a good foundation, easy-to-learn mechanics and addictive gameplay. I spent many long hours, almost 300, happy to play it, eager to explore the gradually developing content and new systems. The game has lofty ambitions, and that in itself is, again, not intrinsically bad. The way the developers went about implementing the change is where crap hits the proverbial fan:

More than anything, they knowingly lied to their community, about price points, about release dates, about DLC models, about new features, about retaining game progression, during and soon-to-be post-early-access. It could've been dismissed as excusable had it been only now and then, but it wasn't, it was continual, so much so that we as a playerbase, and many of my personal friends in-game, stopped believing Trek and Prassel at their word, and left the game completely, disillusioned with a developer who would repeatedly deceive, or conceal critical information until the last moment, to simply force it down our throats and ignore the community's pleas. I was very active in the community for a long time, trying to remain levelheaded and even speaking up for Trek on numerous occasions, wanting to believe that what devs were doing were a series of misunderstood mistakes, that soon, someday, things would turn around.

And yes, things change during early-access, even fundamentally so; I acknowledge that, I'm not denying it. But when you set a precedent, when you outline to your fanbase and paying playerbase that certain standards and systems are finalized and irrefutable, that these are the pillars by which the game is based, it is.... disingenous to completely turn around, oftentimes in a matter of days, and say the exact opposite of what you just said. This is all very vague though so let me provide my experience:

Guardians of Orion (or G.O.O.) was, believe it or not, the product of two consecutive failed Kickstarters. Trek couldn't get enough support, and the monetary support they did get ended up being misallocated in a scandal that is not overly relevant to get into. Despite it all, Trek wished to honor those that did step forward and pledge to donate, and ended up pooling together enough money from their first title to fund the intial development of GOO. In a show of good faith that I still have to admit was heartening, they gifted a free copy of the early-access version once it hit Steam to every user who'd pledged on their second Kickstarter - possibly also their first, I don't remember, it doesn't really matter, the scope was massive either way, encompassing hundreds of players. I was among them, and openly admit I received Guardians of Orion for free - if to anyone that invalidates my opinions forthwith, that is for you to decide. This formed GOO's beginning playerbase, a lot of avid players from Prelude who religiously followed Trek's news feeds; so it's no small thing to say that any number of these fans ended up losing faith in Trek and GOO's direction.

Its Steam release, as I recall, marketed initially at $10 or $15, which was a bit, for a far-from-finished sci-fi shooter with still very few functional systems beyond the ability to open a lobby from a linear menu and start only one game mode. After systems got more streamlined and Trek was feeling comfortable with their new engine, in a show of philanthropy, they lowered the price to a momumentally low $1, and made a big show, I mean a very big show, on Steam, their own site, social media, everywhere, of promising this was to be the definitive pricing model going forward, that it wasn't about the money for them, just about satisfying their fanbase with gradual content updates. Gradual, free updates. Prassel himself during this period publicly denounced DLC as a shameless moneygrab that only large game companies used as an excuse to pilfer from their dedicated fanbase. In the community, he very vocally expressed how DLC was taking advantage of a player whose only means to improve their experience in a game was to pay real money for it, and advocated that so long as players paid for a game, they should be entitled to all aspects of it from the outset.

I remember being happy about the price drop because it meant an end to the dark ages where no-one knew about this title, that finally we'd see a bigger community and more lobbies than ever before because of the universal promotion. I literally bought 15 copies, one for each of my closest friends on Steam at the time, encouraging them to wait for a good thing as the game grew. Most did not stay, for the plethra of launch issues each major patch introduced.

In any event, naturally, the promotion was an overwhelming success, for all its intended purposes: Maximizing players, stirring renewed community involvement, and tenfold more hype for the future. The player load became so great that sometimes servers went down, which disgruntled some but was inevitable. Unfortunately devs during this transition were often slow to address this, resulting in a few evenings flatlining through the entire night - this has gotten marginally better since, for the record, but doesn't bode well for 2.0 release at all, assuming the build is anywhere near as functional as Trek's been boasting.

Some months into the new pricing model, when player interest was tapering off, Trek decided to radically change their stance on DLC, introducing the 'Elite Edition', a whopping $100 purchase that locked away immediate exclusive content and essentially first hands-on rights to all new upcoming content, some of the latter trickling down eventually to Standard users, but often either at substantial in-game price or in simply lesser proportion and quality.

Fans were shocked at the abrupt change, and the community was in an uproar as Prassel angrily defended his position, banning naysayers on a whim. You'd be hard-pressed to find such discussions anymore, however, as after media coverage started running of the more outrageous extremes of these events, Trek was thorough in cleaning up records of its existence. And while this does begin to wander into the realm of unbelievability, this is all real: If you don't believe me, the articles are still up on various game coverage sites, even if the proof is no longer available in the Steam community.

Around this time is when I myself stopped mingling in the community circles, for fear of, as we jokingly called it, the 'banhammer', especially after some of the most outspoken individuals FOR Trek promptly reversed their opinions after observing the chaos that Prassel and his dev-time were truly capable of. I do remember that due to some breach of protocol somewhere, Valve forced Trek to briefly change their game to Free-to-Play, with Trek of course welcoming this change under the guise of promoting player growth and transparency.

Not long after, Trek returned to its $1 model, and soon after that, announced a huge price hike to $25 in its abrupt 2.0 release. I think that speaks for itself, given their previous position and my character limit having been reached. I leave you to decide for yourselves.

tl;dr Trek says what the public wants to hear, then undercuts their confidence. They are making a game only they want, and have no vested interest in the community or its opinions anymore.

Theft
Threats[imgur.com]
Lies[imgur.com]

This is one of the few titles that legitimately should NOT be allowed to exist on the Steam marketplace. I saw that the reviews were mixed and wanted to work towards ensuring that wasn't the case. GOO is a cauldron of hot anuz being stirred around by shameless troglodytes who have zero respect for game development, freedom of speech, or you.

January 3rd of this year (2018), when the game was still asking you to pay $25 for it, developement was said to be over and done with. Now, the game is a $1....AGAIN (this is a vicious cycle that has gone on for years). And yes, supposedly, development is back up and running...AGAIN. If the aforementioned is true, give it a couple months and this title will proudly ask you for 20+ dollars again, then die, then come back for pennies a sale, then bump the price, then die, etc.

My prior reviews have, of course, been deleted! Let's see if this one sticks around for any amount of time.

I used to be all for this game, it was being developed at a nice rate and there was all kinds of interesting stuff to look forward to in the future like an open world and things.

But now it's just a mess. Even if you look at the pricing you get an idea that they don't know what they are doing, was 20 dollars, no now 1, no now free, no now 20 again, no wait back to 1 ... each time messing around with what people had. I was initially worrried when there were design decision that the community wasn't into that were just discarded in an offhand manner telling us they'd make sense later, well it's been later and they still don't. Remember that open world I mentioned? It got pushed back adn there's no sign of it now, good thing they are talking about adding in pokemon kinda pets and things (though maybe that's not happening either now). It's just a mess.

The final straw for me was when one person discovered some sort of exploit to get free cash shop money. Their response? Reset everyone's accounts. We were supposed to be getting some rewards based on certain milestones (kills, waves gotten to in survival, etc). By now you can guess what happened. That scorecard came out with 0s on it for most people, they've not acknowledged that at all, but are just giving a little bit of free stuff to everyone, which in no way fixes things especially for those of us who put hundreds of hours into teh game.

I really can't imagine this game continuing on for long, and with all my guardians now reset to 0 I just have 0 incentive to play the same repetitious content that we've had since the beginning and I really couldn't recommend this game to anyone (which is a shame as I used to have a glowing review of it on here).

"The Orion Project is a living, breathing and Persistent Universe allowing for you to travel the Galaxy and experience Open World Gameplay like never before!"

The above is NOT what this game is. You load the game up and walk up to a table which opens a server browser where you can pick an instanced match to join with 4 players total. You can play in top down, 3rd, or 1st person. It's a match based arcade style shooter.

THIS IS NOT AN AN OPEN PERSISTENT UNIVERSE LIKE THEY SAY IN THE DESCRIPTION.

Give your 1$ to homeless guy. his smile is worth than this game.

This game is a blatant scam.
I don't mean the legit DMCA claims on this game stealing assets from other shooters.
I don't mean the blatant insults[imgur.com] and threats[imgur.com] some moron lead developer makes on community discussions.
I mean the whole game is a scam.

$1 is okay for a casual game, even when there's an incredibly cancerous developer behind it. People can buy a game for $1 and not have to care about the game's description being a blatant lie, or the developer making threats to other players (see other reviews) and/or claiming someone hacked his account (but somehow managed to use the same ISP) to say all those things just to cover his backside.

But the game isn't $1 anymore. It's $25.
Guardians of Orion, a game that claims to be an open world, explorative MMORPG[i.imgur.com], is none of these things.

Guardians of Orion is a horde-mode game in an instanced setting where you shoot the same 8(?) enemies for 10 (or more) waves, on a smallish map that is not at all connected to any other map, about 90% of the time by yourself (since multiplayer, ironically, has no dedicated servers and severe connection issues). It is the very opposite of an MMORPG. At it's core, it's like a sci-fi version of "Yet Another Zombie Defense" (a $2 game, if I remember right that happens to be way more fun), except with 3 types of robot enemies and about 5 dinosaur enemies.

We've had this exact issue with 'No Man's Sky,' when their developers lied about the game's features to the community not even a few months ago, and that ended in a lawsuit[www.extremetech.com].

I hope for any steam user to have the sense to look at these reviews before blindly buying this game. I bought it back when it was $1 about...a year or so ago. It was boring then, and it's even worse now. It is never going to be worth $25, and even $5 is too much.

This game is no longer in Early Access, and the "finished product" is nothing like the description. There is no acceptable reason for this game to be marketed as it currently is.

You're looking at a game that shouldn't legally be published.

Edit: Added some links and clarification.

Game is officially dead, as of Jan 3 2018 devs declared to not produce any more content, game is in pre-alpha state and buggy, laggy and barebones, could have become something, though.

Update: Oh look, an update might be coming soon... will this game come back from the dead or stay a heap of ideas that are partly realized in wobbly code?

over 400 hr's in this game so why am i voting it down, good question... I must have been mad thinking thinking this dev would or could pull this off... I always gave him the benefit of the doubt. I used to think this guy was just really unlucky, but I like many others learned the hard way.. noone can be that unlucky. Time and time again he would go and do something even more stupider than the last, looking back it's as if he single handedly tries to destroy the game at every turn...

Final straw came December 2016 when they prematurely came out of early access, breaking the game and then promtly dissapeared whilst ramping up the price from $1 to what it is now. They wiped every ones progress and secretly implemented a buy-to-NOT-level-up again system, and then had the cheek to say we all needed our progress to be wiped because one person had been caught hacking currency... Sooo, the buy-to-NOT-level-up again system was just a coincedence was it? PFFT I mean come on did you really think we were going to believe that!!! I really cannot believe they thought we were ALL that stupid... I'm suprised you didn't blame the Russians lol... oh wait...

It is now February 2017, game level mechanics are still broken and even more surprisingly, not a single peep from the dev's.. this can mean only one thing and that my worst fears have been realised.. The cash cow has come home to roost and the dev's plan to move onto other things....

If I'm wrong then I will be the first to take this bad review down and replace it... but untill then..

*READ UNTILL END*
First off, let me tell you, it's not a bad game. The reason I am giving this product a negative review is because it's of the way the developer acts and the things he does.

I am sad I gave David Prassel any of my money.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/4q6xo5/activisions_dmca_claim_on_orion_is_legit_orions/
http://www.gatheryourparty.com/2012/05/04/orion-employee-beatdown/

and even all the way back 5 years ago this happened
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/g2sol/david_prassel_creator_of_orion_prelude_receives/

Now a couple things I've experienced my self:
-The "Elite" package was supposed to be 50% off for founders, forever. So if you couldn't buy it right away, you could later when you had some money. But interestingly, now the Elite package has shot back up to $100.
-They wait till they've raked in all the money they can, then they make their game F2P
http://steamcommunity.com/app/407840/discussions/0/351660338714684747/
They even tried reviving their old game
http://steamcommunity.com/games/104900/announcements/detail/845934212532972448
(also I noticed in Orion: Prelude, when I used to play it ages ago, there was no in game store. Then earlier this year I noticed one was implomented, so clearly this is a move to make money. The game also recently recieved a 1.2gb update which I have tried out and it seems to change nothing, so it's probably to remind people the game exists.
And what do the people who already paid good money for it receive?

♥♥♥♥ all.


Don't buy this game. Don't support this developer. If you really want to play it, it's going F2P anyway.
Well if you did manage to read this, please spread the word. There's a high chance I'm going to be banned so David can censor my opinion. Just like how he constantly changes the games name so all the people who posted stuff elsewhere about how bad it is have a lower chance of the people reading it to find it.

Also, have a read of this: http://www.thejimquisition.com/trek-versus-activision-how-orion-went-from-victim-to-villain-in-one-night/