horrible garbage its just a flash game with nothing good about it seriously its mega garbage

nqh

Boy what a frustrating piece of junk. Yeah, spend 20 minutes carefully engaging enemy ships, slowly building up a craft, only to have some overpower piece of crap fly in off screen and one-shot you, blowing away most of your equipment with no warning. This game sucks. The whole premise is that you ARE ALWAYS WEAK. As you get more powerful pieces of equipment the game unlocks more powerful ships. What this means is that you never get to enjoy advanced equipment. Hey, did you just defeat a more advanced enemy? Good job. Now you have a more advanced, nimble, and powerful ship. But did you expect to get to use that equipment to engage in a fun fight with other ships? Nah. All your new powerful equipment can be one-shotted by the next enemy you encounter. So this game is just one big exercise in how long can you carefully sneak around the map, carefully selecting your battles, until you get unlucky enough to get caught off guard and hit ONCE by an enemy ship, and then you're basically screwed. What a waste. The premise of this game is quite good. The execution? SUUUUUUUCKS. Do not buy. Not even worth $10

I like the game but there is very little in terms of content
u have one successful run and then the game is over basically i wouldnt pay 8 bucks again but since i still like what little there is to play i wouldnt go for a refund

tl;dr its just a more polished version of the webgame plus a couple of new parts
but once u beat clones it doesnt really have that much replay value

Do you like feeling like you're constantly in an uphill fight no matter how "strong" you've become. Then this game is for you. I just can't enjoy building a ship watching it get blown up against the new power level enemies and not have anyway to rapidly get back to fighting. The last part of the trilogy attempts to remedy this, but does so by nixing the building aspect and going full A.D.D. with everything. 4/10. Not for me.

The AI and "eh buddy you shot me" detection in Forever is horrendous, the difficulty curve in Successor is horrendous, the AI intelligence in Imposter is too good it feels like ships that are purposefully designed to be impossible to drive are literally everywhere and the AI drives them with no difficulty making it even more bull

Not very happy with this purchase. And that was with it on special at 25% off. No story, no quest line, just asteroids clone with some added parts/abilities. Zoom out is horrid, I've been killed several times by stuff I couldn't even see yet. Save/load designs is not implemented in this version.

I do not recommend, even on special.

3 Things:
1. The main menu is a seizurefest. Fix it. It's painful to look at.
2. The gameplay loop of this game is not interesting. It too quickly gets repetitive.
3. The rotating background on some of the modes is nauseating.
Regardless, I will never play this game again.

Nowhere near as fun as the originals. No maps, No stations. No need for Oxygen modules. The fun just isnt there anymore.

Captain Forever: (will review others once I get to them)
This is a really cool concept, but has several glaring game design issues which get in the way of making it fun. I've played this much more in the browser version but was revisiting it now that it's on Steam.

First of all, the building. A cool mechanic. But, in practice, it's not actually fun:
- The most successful build seems to be keeping your ship tiny, like just putting 2 blocks on either side and filling the front with lasers and the back with thrusters. There's basically no reason to keep adding parts onto your ship to turn it into a behemoth. Adding parts is a liability because it hurts maneuverability and makes you a bigger target and less able to take out tougher enemies by wedging into them so they can't turn.
- They are constantly throwing enemies at you so you never have enough time to grab parts and rebuild. This also discourages building larger ships because it takes much longer to swap out certain parts on bigger ships than smaller ones. I always felt rushed in building so I never really got to engage with the system in a satisfying way. I would rather have some time to build up more. I would rather be able to build ships that are a little bigger. But it just can't be done. You have to stick to a bare minimum of girder parts and coat it with thrusters / lasers.
- Overall I found the game to be very frustrating because there are so many ways with the building system to shoot yourself in the foot without realizing it. Once I discovered a better approach to ship design (by watching a youtube video), I actually started having fun. I was at risk of just quitting the game because I had such a hard time reasoning about how to build my ship. There's too much freedom to make too many bad decisions and not enough direction guiding you towards better decisions. But that better approach was VERY simple and not very interesting.
- Even if you stick to a very minimal build, it STILL feels like there is not enough time to upgrade after you kill an enemy. I really wish they'd just give you a bit more of a break.
- The difficulty increases when you kill a higher tier enemy, even if all of their parts are missing, meaning difficulty goes up even when you have no better parts available.

Building system is just one of the problems. Here's some of the others:
- Mouse acceleration is forced on and mouse movement is quite laggy and sluggish. I can respect if the designer wanted players to always be rushed to scavenge and build rather than sit around and design large ships, but the lack of precise mouse controls really gets in the way of this.
- At the last tier of enemies, the game breaks its own rules and you lose access to all previous tiers of enemies. This is incredibly stupid. There's no hope of getting parts after you kill your first 2nd-to-last tier of enemy. Because the final tier is so strong, if you take even one barrage of shots you might lose any chance of clearing the game. This did not increase my excitement, as it was probably intended, it just made me mad because the rules suddenly changed with no chance to react. You can basically get stuck on the last tier because you can't take out any enemies due to taking a single hit but you can't get new parts from lower tier enemies.
- The amount of damage one shot can do to you is just idiotic. There is ZERO chance to react to an enemy in some cases, especially due to how much range the shots have compared to how big your viewport is.
- Mistakes are extremely punishing. You can lose all of your progress in a game in a few seconds. This would be fine if the game felt fair.
- Differences in color between tiers are very hard to tell in some cases. If the game wants to have fast paced building it needs to do a better job of communicating which parts are better.

IMO the biggest issue is the viewport and how it makes the game feel unfair. The only warning you get that there are offscreen enemies is occasional chirps and a radar blip. But they seem to cut each other off, so when there's lots of enemies offscreen it's hard to know where they are. Worst of all, at the higher tiers of enemies, the shots can travel most of the width of the screen. If you are flying, you might suddenly run into an enemy with ZERO warning and that's game over because those lasers can one shot most of your parts. At the highest tier of enemies, you basically have to keep the enemies offscreen or else you will get hit. That's not a fun way to do spaceship combat. You should be able to see your enemy and maneuver around them and stuff, not have to just remember where they are outside of the screen. They should've made it possible to zoom out further IMO.

It should be pretty obvious that things that you need to deal with / react to should be things that are onscreen or that have some way of communicating critical information to you. You should not suddenly see an enemy show up out of nowhere with no radar blip warning you only to lose half your parts after a single barrage of lasers. You should not have to keep an enemy outside the edge of your screen in order to be able to engage in combat with them.

My suggestion to designers would be - if you want to make a very challenging and punishing game, that's totally fine. But as far as I'm concerned, if you want to do that, you had better do an EXCELLENT job of making loss feel fair, and unfortunately they just haven't done that in this game. I can give leeway to a game that might have some unfair things that isn't super challenging or punishing, but I won't give that leeway to a game that is very challenging and punishing.

That said, I still can't stop playing the game. The sense of progression is fun and the aesthetic is very consistent. It's just that the combat seems to rely more on jank than anything else (flying up next to an enemy's side so they can't out-turn you, letting enemies shoot each other to death, circling around an enemy's blind spot and shooting them a bunch with basically zero risk to you), as with many physics-based games. I just can't recommend this because the game is really not fun until you actually figure out how to build and fight properly, and figuring that out on your own is IMO pretty hard. Until you do, you are bound to be more frustrated than anything.

Captain Successor:
Ughhh...pretty much all the same stuff applies. Building is somewhat more fun due to the options, but I have yet to figure out how to build well which is proving frustrating. There are so many different parts now that it's fun to try stuff out, but honestly I find myself sticking to the same basics that were available in the first game. Still not enough time to build.

Actually, in some ways Successor is worse - the amount of enemy variety means that many more encounters seem to be ones you should bypass. I feel that the overall pacing is worse and I go longer stretches without encountering anyone, even when flying around a bunch. Quite a few of the enemies now don't appear to have much of a weakness (lasers on all sides, spinning rapidly) so it's better to just ignore them. It makes for a somewhat more slow paced and boring experience.

I just ended yet another 40 minute run due to an enemy who produced no radar blip who was traveling blazingly fast and was a wall of lasers. I had no chance, they rammed me, preventing me from escaping, and I was dead in less than a second. Awful game design.

Captain Impostor: My personal favorite, however it is still plagued by the viewport issues as you get to the higher tiers.