Is the game quite playable in it's current state? Potential buyer on the fence ;)

[Carolus Magnus]

I came across this interesting little title in my store perusing a few days ago, and with some bucks to spend I thought it might be nice to grab this one and support the devs, if nothing else.

I wondered mainly if the game is already in a fair, playable state, and whether it "works" overall, so to say.

I'm quite on the fence, so I'll be happy to hear what the community has to say on this one.

[Metalfusion]

As you can see, the game unfortunately doesn't really have a large enough active player base to form a community. Copies are being sold continuously, but median play time is quite low. However, some players have played for up to dozens of hours. It is a cheap single player game, which promotes "buy, try and forget" kind of ownership instead of being invested into it and forming an active community.

A particular thing is that the game is generally not that simple to get into due to complexity arising from some of the core non-compromising mechanics such as the frictionless physics. I would say that the features and content there are work quite well, but to enjoy the game you need to be interested in setting up and playing the generally somewhat chaotic battles. Then if you expect to get several hours from the game, you'll likely also need to be interested in the engineering puzzle that is ship design.

The game comes with somewhat difficult "battle challenges" that can take few hours to beat total, playing random battles casually can be fun for shorter bursts, the ship designs that come with the game and player created ships in the workshop give a lot of combinations to try in custom battles for few hours, and some players spend many hours with ship design. Creating new levels like the battle challenges is also possible, but the level editor is a bit crude at this point.

[Carolus Magnus]

Originally posted by Metalfusion:

As you can see, the game unfortunately doesn't really have a large enough active player base to form a community. Copies are being sold continuously, but median play time is quite low. However, some players have played for up to dozens of hours. It is a cheap single player game, which promotes "buy, try and forget" kind of ownership instead of being invested into it and forming an active community.

Oh, that's quite a nice large answer.
i've got the game, and I don't mind investing quite some time learning the quirks. I got it mainly for the little engineering challenges as a matter of fact, and I'm never shy of scaling a learning curve.

I do play a lot more complex building and design/battle games, so I was hoping this would fill the niche for a little side investment in between. This seems to answer quite nicely. I bought the game a while ago, so consider that another copy shifted ;)