Ah yes, Space Laser Dildos: The Game.

It’s like the hunt for red october but in space and with railguns.

This game is amazing and I'm terrible at it, which means it's very good.

Huh, a space combat game that is legit space combat and not air combat in space, finally! This is realistic to a point where only fractions of fractions of gamers would ever bother to play sadly.

This is the best game to actually capture what the Expanse combat seems like. It is by far the hardest (in the scifi sense) space combat l've ever seen in any game ever, and it even beats a lot of movie shows, and books in terms of hardness. Heck, it beats the Expanse… It uses VERY close to the same space combat tech and tactics that you see in the show. It’s got low graphics but is great to have to smartly use your limited delta-v to make your desired orbital intercept, and then use your armament to your advantage.

As a game, it isn’t perhaps the most fun space game ever. But as a simulator of orbital mechanics it is fantastic. Almost all depictions of spaceflight in games, tv, and movies are ridiculously inaccurate in terms of physics, scale, and engineering. Spacecraft are not aircraft, nor are they ocean going vessels. There are plenty of books, both fiction and non-fiction that describe spaceflight realistically, but it was very instructive to see an interactive visual representation of it.

The atmosphere of this game is also so good. Many other space combat games make space look so bright and colorful and full - whereas this game makes it feel so harsh, empty, and unforgiving. I really did get a sense of how vast and empty the spaces between the planets can be. When I sheered an enemy in half with Railgun fire and watched their unpowered crew module drift away into space, it definitely felt different than blowing up some ship in Elite: Dangerous for instance.

It’s got a bit of a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, it's delightful fun. Designing engines and weapons can be surprisingly fun, and although some of the exploits have been patched, you can still make some flat-out ridiculous equipment. Nuclear thermal rocket turbopump made of ultra-high molecular weight plastic? Sure, why not?

The physics are top-notch, even simulating such things as the angle at which projectiles hit the hull. The interface can be a bit knotty, and missiles have a bit of a guidance problem. Not on their final approach, that's just fine, but missiles are usually launched days before an encounter, and you plan their trajectory and intercept just like you plan them for your actual ships. Which of course leaves plenty of time for evasion, which the Al doesn't make enough use of (it'll still be a lot of readjusting trajectories, which can get a bit annoying, although the auto-reintercept feature definitely helps), and Al controlled missiles react to trajectory changes of your ship way too quickly, so you can run them out of dv rather easily… although that, too, is finicky work, adjusting your trajectory half a dozen times.

In fact, planning an encounter is what you do most of the time. You can still give a few simple orders once your vessels make actual contact (though in a retrograde intercept, just forget about it... you assign targets, whizz by and see if you made a good decision), but in general that's just the moment you see whether your plan was any good.

The setting is great if a bit stereotypical at times, but the author has a clear understanding of how armed conflict actually works and why it is fought (no gung-ho save our civilization crap here, as an admiral you are informed about reasons, necessities and predictions, not fed propaganda), which makes the campaign "story" quite enjoyable. Story is in quotes because it's really more of a series of briefings and after-action reports than a story, but thanks to copious amounts of flavor text for factions, their motivation, and all the politics going on while you're doing the fighting, I found it quite immersive. Overall the story is great, political intrigues are believable and the whole setting is quite cool if somewhat scary. You'll be reading a lot, though.

The game has a lot of technical background under the hood, which only becomes visible when you try to customize ships, or even design system. The spacecraft design is pretty realistic, and therefore visually boring and very samey at first glance (there's only so many ways to design the hull of an effective combat spacecraft), but strategically the vessels have very specific roles, and you'll have to get familiar with those. The thing that got me was that I was finding myself checking loadouts and capabilities of new vessels very thouroughly as they became available, and was more looking at them with the interest I would read about real live battleships or fighter planes.

They are so distinct in their capabilities, and those capabilities often become so important, that they even started to look much more distinct. There is no mistaking the radiators of a laser frigatte, the bulky, unadorned cylinder without any heavy guns of a drone carrier or the pencil-shaped, optimised for small frontal cross-section hull of a gunship. After a while it starts to feel more like studying actual identification charts. I have to admit that no other scifi setting so far has given me the same feeling of "realness" and importance for its ships. And then of course you can start building your own. It's hilariously complex, and I thoroughly enjoyed finetuning things, which is definitely necessary to come up with better ships than the ones you're provided with.

Purely on the gameplay side, this is an old-school strategy game. The kind where you have a linear campaign, and every mission is essentially a puzzle to figure out. You'll do a lot of trying this, restarting mission, trying that, until you see how all the pieces fit together and can devise a way to beat the odds with what you have available. Just be aware that most of your time will be spent in planning maneuvers and allocating weapons.

The actual watching of weapon impacting or missing is fun, but you are more of a passenger here, not much interaction is possible. If you enjoy that kind of strategy game, are into spaceships and trajectory planning, and can live with getting annoyed with the interface and a bit too much micromanagment every now and then, you should definitely give it a try. Sadly, it seems it’s the closest we’ll ever get to an Expanse game anyhow, so… what are you waiting for Beltalowda?

9/10

100 1kt nuclear missiles