Molto bello per gli amanti di questo genere.
Semplice, intrigante, divertente, immersivo...
Sarebbe molto apprezzato linguaggio italiano, almeno le descrizioni / sottotitoli.
Prezzo buono; consiglio agli amanti di giochi Spaziali / futuristici, ne vale la pena.

I want to love Between the Stars, I really, really, really, really, REALLY BADLY want to love Between the Stars. At first blush, this was the "you are a capital warship" space game I really wanted.

But the following problems need to be addressed by the devs before I can recommend this game:

First: The un-sane crafting system. "Crafting takes real time" works in an MMORPG because the MMORPG has a vested financial interest in you taking a lot of time to do it. It does not work in Between the Stars. I have found myself spending several hours of real time not playing my game, with it alt-tabbed out in the background, waiting for loot to un-craft for crafting materials. This is not something that you can "just do" while playing either, because the "level" of your recycling center is based upon which engineers you put on "active duty," meaning that if you have your recycling engineers on active duty, you don't have the Specialists who enhance your loot generation on active duty. The same goes for crafting stuff, too, which follows the expected MMORPG schema of "normal quality" "uncommon quality" and "rare quality," and of course you're an idiot if you invest crafting materials in upgrading a weapon or auxiliary gear item of less than Rare quality. After all, it took you literal hours of real time spent not playing your game to get those!

Second: Dialogue choices and dice mechanics that lead to permanent consequences. You can pick the "wrong" dialogue choice and get slapped in the loins with a forever penalty. Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't want to, on foot, charge headlong into a kill box of hostile enemies and looked for another option? Suddenly my ship doesn't turn as fast because I lost the "reckless" trait which is a positive trait in this game, for... Reasons.

And then there's the dice. To start with, understand that at eighty hours of gameplay, my captain is only at level eight. I invested all of my captain's skill points into Luck, because this is the kind of game where spreading the points out makes you a jack of all trades, competent at none of them. You also need to understand that every two points invested in a given skill so gives you one die to roll on skill checks which call for that skill. These skill checks are few and far between, not all of them are equally represented in frequency, and dice rolling is a target number system: whether you throw one die or five, the only thing that matters is whether any of those dice exceed the Target Number.

So even if you're a god of Luck, and you have 5d10 dice to throw on Luck rolls, if the target number is 8 and all of your dice come up 7 or less, you still fail.

There is no counter-play, there's no way to 'bump' the dice 'box', that's all you get; a straight-up tabletop RPG style dice roll. And the rule rather than the exception is that only one skill can be applicable to any situation (I have seen one situation where it let me roll two different skills), so if you've invested all your points in, say, Luck, and it calls for Aptitude, you've got yourself a problem.

This is not fun, because it leads to save-scumming. I've spent the last two hours trying to succeed with one Aptitude die on two sequential Aptitude rolls to avoid being forced to make a sadistic choice to decide whether one of my hard-to-replace, hard-ground-up crewmen is executed by an NPC, or some random named NPC that got foisted off on me.

Allegedly there's an option to disable this mechanic if you don't like it. I tried to use this option, but though it let me succeed on the first "roll," it told me I "failed" the second. Is that roll literally rigged? I don't know. Now I'm spending ages trying to figure out how to cheat and just give myself points, because this is not fun gameplay.

I came for the big shooty space-ships, not sadistic roguelike elements. Stop trying to cram roguelike elements into other games, and stop trying to cram MMORPG crafting into singleplayer offline games.

Side note: it's telling that in the tutorial, crafting and uncrafting go by at approximately light-speed rather than the usual rate. Probably because if it did take the normal time, everyone would refund immediately. I'm starting to wish I had.

I want to love Between the Stars, but until they fix these problems, I cannot. There needs to be some kind of "no, to hell with the dice, I'm the captain, I said I succeeded on that roll!" counterplay.

[edit] Having been frustrated enough to cheat for maximum points for my captain and crew to see if there was anything imaginable that I could have done differently, I found that the impossible mission is rigged: there's an Aptitude 8 test, followed by an Aptitude 9 test. Even if you succeed in both of those rolls, the text "rewards" you by letting you achieve a temporary "big damn heroes" moment... And then the game randomly murders one of your crewmen anyway.

[edit2] I now wish I had refunded this game. The devs deleted all my feedback in their Discord, citing that I was "flooding" the channel (I cannot help but flood if I am actively playing the game, commenting on issues I perceived as they arise, and nobody else is responding), citing "spoilers" in a server which had no spoiler rules and I was, in fact, attempting to give useful feedback (regarding the level of frustration I was having) on a game that I literally paid them to test for them, and "insulting," when I had done no such thing.

So, the game comes so close to being the game of my dreams, but unless you enjoy being beaten around the head by brutal and awful roguelike elements and spending literal hours not playing your game besides tabbing back in to throw more junk into the junk grinder every few minutes, and Devs who apparently think all of that is fine, fine, all of that is perfectly fine like the dog having tea in the room on fire... Pass. I'll keep looking for the "you are a space warship" game of my dreams. This isn't it, just a false messiah.

Premise - I have 18.3hrs in steam but I played like twice in offline mode.

First of all, I am tired to all this "Early Access" garbage that remains Early Access forever with a price that really do not corresponds to the quality, content and polishment of the product.
Just because of it I do not reccomend to buy any Early Access game.
Period.
... and blame on Valve to allow this to happen ...

About the game:
(Only cons)

Gameplay
- Too short for his price
- Unfinished in many parts
- Some riddles are ridiculous
- The dice System is a no no (deactivate it)
- ZERO replayability
- Sandboxing becomes pointless and boring pretty soon

Graphic is meh
- Quite average general graphic - Whoever says different is blind
- Systems becomes quite soon repetitive
- Ship models are so limited and non original
- Stations are always the same
- Comic like "cut-scenes" and dialogue screens are so obviously a money save escamotage

The combat system simply sucks
- You do not feel the weapon difference
- Ah no you feel it... Homing missiles are just op
- The camera roll is limited on 90° in the Y axis... WHAT IN A 3D Space battle simulation game?
- The upgrades you make are then compensated with a dumb AI with increased stats... clap clap clap devs
- Autotargeting is bugged like... it doesn't work
- Battle tactics are inexistent even tho you can create a sort of fleet
- Fleet AI is a waste of resources and time... they ALWAYS die

The story is childish; who wrote your script?
- You cannot feel you have to do something in the game to follow a story
- You simply go from point A to point B
- You simply fight that amount of number of "always the same ship"
- Decision making is pointless since the "Dice system" simply break everything
- - You can disable the "Dice System" stil lthe decision making is quite pointless - Nothing really change in the game events

The upgrade and crafting system is terrible
- Crafting requires REAL TIME... ohhh comeon...
- SCRAPPING requires REAL TIME... really?
- Weapon upgrades and ship setup are so critically limited that you end up with the min-max only workable ones

The crew system can be totally ignored
- Why is there? What actually affects performance of the crew?
- Why improving captain stats doesn't matter if you just put LUCK (redistributable points everywhere) as the main one?
- Why crew stats shall affects module performances and/or crafting speed but not EFFICIENCY?

Do not buy the game

Complimenti! CHEERS!
Grafica molto curata , versatilità massima per un gioco spaziale.
Ma la Storyline!!! WOW Complimenti a chi ha scritto questa storyline! Sembra un film o un Libro dove vuoi leggere sempre di più e girare pagina dopo pagina! Aspetto con impazienza che la storia venga continuata dopo che divento Commandante dei Children of Sun!!!
Ottimo bilanciamento delle navi! L’asset dell’inventario mi ricorda moltissimo Il gioco DarkOrbit, Pratico ,Semplice, Intuitivo.
Complimenti davvero ragazzi, Adesso continuate con gli Update!
Buone Feste e Grazie di regalarci questo gioco degno di un film!!!

The game needs to be pulled down from sales until a 1.0 release. Here is the current timeline for this game:

Release mid '21
- End of '21: Dev states they have been delayed but they are working on the game and 1.0 will be out in the first half of '22.
- Mid '22: Dev releases new game in early access, Traveller's Rest, stating they started as 1 man and now have a development team.
- No official statements or updates on this game since May of '22 when a few very small bugs were fixed.
- End of '22: Dev is in the Steam discussion boards posting that the game will be out in a few months. But, admits in a post that NOTHING has been done other than storyline writing. No development, coding, QA, nothing. Dev also admits that all attention is on the new game, not this one.

This is a perfect example of a game where Steam needs to step in and take action. As of this review it is for sale for $29.99. An unfinished game where they dev has moved on and used the money from this early access to start another game. The most insulting thing is the other game is also early access, for sale right here on Steam.

As of right now it should be considered abandoned until the dev actually releases some code updates to show active development on the game. You have been warned. This is a game where you get a little bit of somewhat buggy story and then can spend hours upon hours hunting new ships... to do nothing in.

Gioco molto interessante. Combina esplorazione battaglie spaziali alle meccaniche di giochi cartacei come D&D.
Purtroppo essendo ancora in fase acerba non è esente da molteplici bug meccanici e grafici ed è mal ottimizzato.
In oltre la storia non è completa e il gameplay è ancora scarno.
Attendo al più presto la versione finale.

this game is has far to many issues such as

*Buying a New Ship and outfitting it with the best weapons means nothing because you will just be fighting AI Ships that have the same ship or boosted stats so you never really become stronger.

*there are AI Captains you can buy that aid you in combat and you can outfit them ships yourself but the main issue is the devs for some stupid reason have made it so they get huge Debuffs and are useless for everything, i spent over 40k credits getting 2 AI Captains who had 2 of the best Battleships in the game i outfitted them with some of the best gear in the game and they both got destroyed in a story mission where you retake a station. might not seem bad but spending 40k on two ships that are ament to be super overpowered but because of the Debuffs they only had 2000 Shield and just over 1500 Hull that is a joke, my mid battleship has over 5000 hull and just over 3000 shield on it and its not even maxed out so a way worse ship can be more overpowered with shield and hull tanking then a Big BattleShip that is built for raining hell down on everyone.

*the whole chance stuff in the game is broken to hell such as for me everytime i would pick to do something such as let the two crewmates have sex it would hit me with a really stupid debuff that made my game pretty much broken because i was not able to lvl up my crew or anything for along time around 15 hours of gameplay was me trying to figure out how to remove the debuffs so i could play the game.

*the crafting,Scrap and Healing takes far to long in game even at lvl 20 work tables it takes to long, i spent around 3 to 4 hours of gameplay just sitting still and doing nothing because i was waiting to scrap stuff seem my storage was full.

*the devs have not at all even tried to balance any of the major game mechanics that need to be balanced in order to play the game. i think the devs need to stop trying to fix bugs and need to pay way more attention on fixing the unbalanced AI and Combat.

after my 2 big AI Battleships got blown up i have just uninstalled the game, i have had enough of spending alot of credits just for my ships to be blown up in one hit because the devs feel its good to put a -25% to -30% on the major stats that matter on the AI Controlled ships you can buy. the worst part is once they get blown up that's it you need to buy them again its really stupid. them AI Ships that you can buy should not have any debuffs on them at all and if they get blown up you should be able to recall them without needing to spend all the time and effort on grinding credits and trying to find them in the market again.

*i also came across a thing where most of the enemies can kill you even though you have full shields up so ship shields are pretty much useless in the game.

i do not recommend buying this game unless you just wanna waste your time and money.

Pros:
+ Variety of weaponry.
+ Great voice acting.
+ Very active developers.

Cons:
- Unfinished story.
- A little bit more time unreleased will help the game to be polished.


The prologue is awesome, it introduces one of the best ships of the game and we, as the captain fight a rebellion that doesn't end well. That's when the protagonist jumps to another smaller captain whose actions lead to an end, the same position as the first protagonist, with the difference that the last one survives, getting involved with several factions.

In the early game, it is very hard to move out from the first ship. At the moment you can afford to buy a ship, you will be able to buy the third, ten times faster and so on. When I could afford to buy this last, I was already in the last two missions available.

Most of the time, in order to do serious damage to an enemy, you will need to get some intel about them, to do that you must lock sight on the ships for a few seconds, and information about their weak points will be revealed. At the moment, there are only three weak points on all ships, and one of them will be even weaker (front, middle, and back).

The crew can redirect the power of the ship to the engines, the shields or the weaponry. Depending on the situation it is in the best interest to redirect it to the weaponry if a fight is about to start (to get the advantage) or to the shields if the ship is under heavy fire.

One of the cool interactions while exploring is to be intercepted by other ships, commonly, to force a fight in which rewards for survival are often welcome. Now, it is very hard to escape from any fight, so, most of the time, I've been with my ship fully repaired.

Controls are hard to learn at the beginning. I recommend paying extra attention to the prologue because you will end up using all the available keys pretty often. At least, if you don't like the default key for any action, you can customize it on the options menu.

Bugs
This is something that I took some time to realize, enemy ships fighting each other. (doing my job, huh)

Overall, I've been finding several bugs and grammar mistakes, and after talking with the developer, those were fixed in the next 24h. This is possible because of a bug report option in the game that is due, to an Early Access stage, that he can afford.

Graphics
Graphically, the game looks awesome in its best configuration, but a very strong graphics card will be needed to afford these views. This is a very active game, so every fps counts in order to enjoy the stars, even if it's necessary to sacrifice a little bit of graphics.

However, I played the game with a 1050ti and 8GB of RAM, running the game at medium graphics with constant 60 fps and if upgraded to high graphics, it would lower to 15-30.

The game counts with a screenshot option that will hide the HUD temporarily for you to take some beautiful images, being able to adjust some graphical settings.

Error 404 Ammunition not found
Some weapons, like lasers, won't need ammunition, but will heat those weapons fast, and, in the end, let the defenses of the ship very weak. Firing too much and fast has been a cause of death for me several times.

On the other hand, there are other weapons like missiles that, apart from sharing that lack of ammunition, share a cooldown that won't allow those to be used.

Character customization
This one is weak, the character modeling lacks value and there are not many options to choose from. For example, it looks like some hairstyles are slightly separated from the top of their heads. On the other hand, I have only seen the protagonist's portrait when he/she talks in the game.

At least, in the customization, you can randomize starting stats (pros and cons), but, without knowing what does every stat, it is hard to choose correctly.

Looting
Defeated ships can be looted. This gives more reasons to attack enemies (even when they are neutral or at your mercy).

Once the battle is over, we won't need to get near the ships one by one, but just clicking on them will be enough to loot'em.

Content and price
To be honest, the 20h that took me to complete the game felt like 40h. The main reason for this is that it feels very heavy to travel on space, and I wish there was some kind of better turbo or teleport for visited zones. Despite that, the events that occurred meanwhile kept me distracted enough.

The price is justified by all the developer's work. I recommend paying the price offered in Early Access, which will be much cheaper.

Sound
The soundtracks are good, but most of the time, they won't stop even at the menu. Also, the voices of the characters will be heard until the end of their phrases if we pause the game.

Difficulty
There are two difficulties, but more than that, I would say two different settings, because one will allow the ship to respawn after being defeated, while the hardcore settings will reset the game after death. The game is already difficult, and I've been losing members of my crew (there are so many that I forget about them and lost half of the members at once after some battle).

Now, the difficulty is progressive, meaning that the more you advance through the campaign, the harder ALL sectors will be; stronger ships, more requirements...

After buying my third ship, I became literally unstoppable. I saved some good weapons in the storage since I didn't have more room in my ship, but after the upgrade, I managed to end my enemies way faster than before. I wasn't even close to the best ships of the game, and I felt I was strong enough for any challenge.

Replayability
Visited sectors can be checked for new blueprints, contracts, and new items to buy. New events can appear after visiting old sectors, making it worth the ride.

A game with a decent performance that needs to be polished (and needs a finished campaign). With a strong PC as the main requirement to play the game and taste for the space genre. If I could add something, it would be controller support since you can play with the camera settings and more; sadly, it seems that will only happen after Early Access.
Between the stars has been very successful on Kickstarter, so it's only a matter of time before all their promises arrive.

Ora, ho deciso di consigliarlo pur considerando il prezzo veramente un pò troppo alto
il gioco tutto sommato è piacevole ricorda giochi old style nel modo di proporsi nelle musiche che nella grafica, al sottoscritto, avendo qualche anno sul groppone, piace perchè smuove ricordi.
il problema poi peròà è che bisognerebbe tararlo un pò meglio sto gioco perchè ad esempio se mettete 4 lancia missili il gioco è finito sfasciate tutto premendo 1 tasto , oppure le missioni bounty che danno solo 100cr per un pirata catturato sono praticamente inutili e le altre non sono meglio, insomma non è esente da difetti ma il team di sviluppo è piccolo e le capacità le hanno e non mi sono pentito di averlo comprato ... ma in saldo.

The game reminds me a lot of Galactic Phantasy and Galatic Phantasy Prelude by the studio Moonfish, Rebel Galaxy by Double Damage Games, and Starpoint Gemini Warlords by Little Green Men Games. Except this game is notably more bare. Ships are customisable only insofar as you choose what weapons to put in corresponding slots, and ship types often comes down to simply selecting the one with the largest built-in shields and most weapon slots. It is without the mechanic nuance of the games by Moonfish - all weapons consume energy, so mixing weaponry by balancing between missiles, cannons and lasers is pointless.

The universe itself is not dynamic. Frequently world events boil down to fighting two ships, or "helping" the crew of a stranded ship with a dice roll.

I did a test on how stats work, and set the stat points able to be allocated to infinite. I then put hundreds to thousands of these stat points into the captain and crew. The only difference this makes is granting additional dice to roll during the RNG events - there is no bonus for difficulty. The captain's luck skill offers no notable bonus whatsoever. The dice allowed in RNG events is capped at five. For those curious: All dice rolls are done on a D10. Comparisons to DnD are off, I feel, as the story itself and these rolls remind me a lot more of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style done by White Wolf. Stats are incremental of 0.5-1%. You are better served upgrading your equipment for a large flat bonus, and replacing your crew as they die off for the RNG battles. There, levels and stats do not matter. If you have spent time farming, you will have accrued equipment for use in these battles, and your crew then become relegated to fodder while you use action points to use on the equipment.

This proves to be part of a blessing, however, as crew mortality is rather high. Crew health is always capped at three points, and healing crew members takes roughly three to five minutes, at one at a time. Despite a 250% increase in healing time reduction, the length of healing was too long to bother with crew which offered no real benefits and could be replaced. Crew investment was therefore only worthwhile if you were running low on credits to replace them. As a further point: A 1,000% increase in rare items being found offered no notable bonus to what was being picked up earlier on, and I found that the increase in quality of items found was only through story progression.

The story itself offers some nice twists and turns, however there is a lack of a Faction system in place. The BBEG faction only ever shows up at predetermined times in the story, and the fights offer no difference to what you have been doing before with self-assigned bounty hunts. These battles are larger in scale, but only by the increase in ships involved. There is no wingman or group system in place, but not that there would need to be as by end game you are the solo star of the show, steamrolling over everything with wanton abandon. By the end game you may be thinking of upgrading your ship, however the pointlessness of that rears it's ugly head as there isn't any challenging content that would otherwise present itself anyway to warrant it. As stated: you are mostly only fighting two ships at once.

The universe itself does not feel dynamic, which can lead you to feel less engaged with the game. It feels not like a space opera like Infinite Space by PlatinumGames, nor does it have the presence like Starpoint Gemini Warlords or Galactic Phantasy. It feels far more restricted and secluded, as if this were more regional warfare in Africa than imminent global strife, albeit set in space. I think part of that has got to be that this game is missing the ability for the player to weave their own stories into the game. I do not mean having it entirely sandbox - consider the routes players can take in order to achieve the ultimate goal set in the game. There is no real trading, no economy. Fights become lacklustre towards the end game, and the path to that is easy once you understand the game's combat. Combat becomes exponentially less threatening the further you progress. Once you progress in the game, ships reflect exactly the best for what is currently available to the player, meaning you will not see the weaker ships of earlier points in the game. There is no option for piracy, no option for escorts, distance between large swathes of the map are able to be crossed with the click of a button.

The game has a lot of potential, and the male captain's voice reminds me a lot of Mark Meer's Commander Shepard. If the Devs flesh out their universe more, I feel the game would come out from the shadow of others. Once they work out what they want their game to offer beyond what others have done, I feel this could be an easy contender to already established titles.

Time played as of writing review: 10.7 hours.
I will update and change this review with further updates to the game and upon it's release.