When you first open this game, you'll probably light up your main engine and accelerate hard into the rings. You'll smash your ship into a rock at three hundred miles per hour. You'll be frustrated that space physics is hard, and you'll get a refund. Don't do this. Go slowly. Your ship is a hundred year old, sixty ton, nuclear space tractor. Give it the time it needs. Fly like you're driving a fully loaded semi with failed brakes on an ice lake hauling a 4 gigawatt nuclear reactor on the back.

To say Delta V is an "asteroids clone" would be like saying a Saturn V is a V2 clone. There is definitely a kernel of truth in there, but it's so far away from being the whole truth that it seems deeply unfair. More than anything, I think Delta V is a love letter to physics and engineering. Koder (the solo developer) and the active community has collectively spent hundreds, maybe thousands of human-hours hardening the science in this game and at every opportunity it's been kept as realistic as possible. Lots of games try this and become no fun as a result; I love Children Of A Dead Earth for example, but it's more simulator than game. Delta V is one of those rare cases where there is no trade-off between realism and fun. The realism *is* the fun. Everything you change on your ship affects something else, and none of it via arbitrary dice rolls or magic numbers or fudge factors. There's no EVE-Online style "+10% top speed -5% weapon range" part. There is only physics.

The ship upgrade system interlinks with the physics model in a way I don't think I've ever seen in any other game perhaps certain modded versions of KSP. Firing your thrusters washes the reactor with cold propellant, draining it of heat. The reactor responds by throttling up, removing the control rods to meet demand. Graphene radiators dim and a few seconds later burst into life again as the reactor surges back up past 4000K.

Laser beams are invisible until they hit a dust cloud, whereupon they shower the area with scattered photons. Coilguns produce a light show of white hot metallic shrapnel in their residual magnetic field after firing. Thrusters wash the area with concentric cones of plasma exhaust. Don't make me describe that the nuclear salt water rocket does - it's two hundred gigawatts of barely controlled continuously detonating nuclear rage.

The game welcomes both passive and active play - you're welcome to drift idly while your automated microwave emitter turrets slowly melt the ice around you, with automatic disposable haul drones feeding the liberated minerals into your hold where the iron and platinum within is extracted and refined and laser-sintered into new drones. Or you can install high-power fixed forward facing pulse lasers and railguns, shattering asteroids with thermal and kinetic shock before switching the flight computers off and assuming direct control to drive through the resulting fragments manually for a much more hands-on experience.

If you give the game time, if you remember that you're flying a century old nuclear space tractor weighing sixty tons, you'll enjoy a genuinely beautiful experience. Rush, pancake your ship into a rock, and ragequit, and you won't get to enjoy the beautiful atmospheric soundtrack, and you won't survive long enough to hear it seamlessly shift gears into something mysterious or urgent as random encounters unfold around you. You won't get to watch random NPCs get into a fight because one of them stole a valuable chunk of tungsten the other wanted to mine. You won't get to hear the widebeam pings of a lost lifepod's emergency beacon. Take it slow, take it steady, and your big nuclear tractor will slowly take you on a journey that few other game developers are brave enough to try and offer.

Oh and you can put anime girl skins on your spaceship, though they're probably quite hard to see in the darkness of space.

Oye Beltalowda, listen up. This is the game for you! It can be tricky learning to control your ship but once you get the hang of it this is a pretty chilled out and absorbing game. The basic loop of mining asteroids out in the black and gradually building your crew and upgrading your ship, so you can explore further and further, is rewarding and fun, and the quests and stories you uncover are a pleasant surprise. Great soundtrack too.

If you're like me you have a million games and don't know what to play because it either takes too much time or its not as in-depth as you wish it were. You're constantly stuck looking for a game that is in-depth enough but not so much you need to learn something and can take up as much or as little time as you decide. This is a game that fits that bill. and its CHEAP. So no need to pirate it.

Try it for 20 minutes. If i just described you you'll have 40 hours in this game in 3 weeks.

There's no way anyone actually reads this review among the thousands of others, but I had such a good time with this game I wanted to contribute my 0.0001% to whatever the positive review proportion stands at.

It's good!

I am a Belter bosmang.

Edit: The developer pointed out to me that a Peaceful difficulty mode is an option. After trying that out, the game is much more peaceful and relaxing now. Thank you Koder! I'll leave my original review below to highlight the importance of checking for difficulty options before whining.

A 'leave me alone' or 'not interested in stories and mysteries of the rings' game mode would be appreciated. I'm tired of being punished for trying to pursue just mining asteroids.
I read about this game being relaxing and chill. I just want to chill out after real life work and mine rocks. That isn't allowed. It started out okay, and I figured once I work my funds up, I wouldn't have to worry about pirates and mystery ships that want to mic me. Instead, the game constantly throws encounters at me. Trying to go deeper into the rings thinking I've found a quiet place, and the game decides I just found a hostile base that proceeds to annihilate my ship. The base was not visible on lidar and appeared when I was a few hundred meters away. Almost got a claim beacon out, but got sodomized instead. Even the option to hire an escort or own several ships and have protection would go a long way if being left alone isn't possible.
I really like the physics, ship customization, and idea of diving into the rings for rocks. If the game is advertised as being open to one's own playstyle, perhaps the most basic playstyle should be playable and enjoyable.

In a short but still meaningful manner, the best way I can describe this game is by calling it the High Fleet of space mining sims.
If you know High Fleet, you know what I mean, but even so let me just make note of some of the major points and strengths of this game:

- Barely any hand holding. There is a basic tutorial to get you to understand the basic controls, and that is that. After that you gotta figure out everything yourself. For some people this is basically their achilles heel and they need constant guidance to do anything in games, and yunno, that's fine. For others like myself, that true sense of freedom is very welcome.

- Ship customization and handling is truly unique and extremely in-depth. It feels like every ship is a linux distro, with little to no "meta" crap anywhere, what is good is what you feel is good for your playstyle and following arbitrary guides will get you very little enjoyment or even success. Gotta discover what works for you and all that jazz. A good example of the freedom when making your own ship, is that you can accidentally make it use so much power that everytime you use your thrusters you shut-off your powergrid, thus turning off your HUD, which will then need to boot up as your capacitors regain power. When selecting individual modules, the game Does warn you if something uses more heat or energy than you produce, so heed those warnings very well, or... Else ;)

- The game has a variety of systems to keep you entertained. I don't really want to spoil anything, but if you feel like that "just" space mining would be too monotone and uninteresting, do not worry! The dev very much shares that same line of thought, hence why there's an enormous load of things to discover and do in the game. It gives you a good, pretty consistent line of things to do. Bump into derelict ships you can tow back home to refurbish and use, or sell. Find other miners, ask them for useful information, which might lead to rich mineral fields or strange mysteries. The game has a ton going on under the hood, and that mystery and intrigue of not knowing how will your next Ringdive end up looking like is truly exciting. But at the end of the day, pursuing these mysteries and such is a choice you gotta make yourself. If you feel like going full rockfondler mode, that is perfectly okay and there's lots of places where you can do that safely.

- Strong demo and fairly affordable. I try not to bring the price of a game into quantifying it's qualities, but let's be honest, in today's economy and all the chaos, some people might not be able to afford every 60 euro gaming experience off the shelf. This game's base price is quite cheap, and it goes on quite strong sales fairly often. Add to this, a pretty good demo that more than allows you to get a good feel of how the game plays and feels, meaning you can make a pretty well informed decision on this purchase. I will just quickly write this here in case anyone is wondering, all the DLCs are purely cosmetic.

All in all, a very good, if niche game. I can certainly see a lot of people being turned off not by the quality, but rather the type of game this inherently is. But if you are the type of person tantalized by such a game, I guarantee you, it will stick like hot glue!

Sincerely, from a long time sandbox space game fan.


(P.S: Also see: SPAZ, Starsector, Star Valor)

Was minding my own business and wandered into a rescue operation. The Resuce ship hit an asteroid and exploded, sending a life pod careening through the rings. After a harrowing mad dash after it (aka smacking into every rock in my path), the life pod came to a stop.

Once we were about to grab it, I was snuck-up on from behind. The pirate was ready shoot me like a fish in a barrel. The voice over the radio sounds familiar to one of my crew members (the one with an already established shady past). It's a friend she used to raid with. Knowing now that an old comrade is aboard, the pirate backs off and we successfully rescue the survivors.

It's small moments and stories like these that make me love the game.

I can finally scratch that Elite: Dangerous mining, and ship outfitting itch without having to install 60GB of files and a Separate Launcher!

This... this is a weird... "thing".
Game? I guess you could call it that.
It has challenges and gameplay loops, sure.

It's not "fun", or "enjoyable". Those aren't really the terms I would use.
It's interesting, complicated, and mentally engaging.

Everything in the game requires "finesse". Nothing is ever really easy.
Once you get better at doing things, and they start to feel easy, then you start being more confident and aggressive.
And then it's suddenly less easy again.
This, I think, is the fundamental loop that a good game is built on.

Who would I actually recommend this to? I... have no idea.
I don't know why anyone would buy this.
I don't know why *I* would buy it.
There's nothing else like it to even really compare to.
... And maybe that's why it's so fascinating to play.