Recent reviews by The Loan Ranger

A hidden gem for sure. I thoroughly enjoyed the wacky weapons and humor. I'd describe it as a blend of a retro shooter with an art style inspired by 1950's tv robots and a bullet hell. There's plenty of well made references and homages to other classic games like Time Crisis and Metal Gear Solid. You can tell the members of Broadside Games had a lot of fun making this game. It isn't perfect, some of the jokes fall flat and a few others briefly overstayed their welcome like the level with the bouncy floor, I found that to get old fairly quick, luckily I think the studio recognized this and the mechanic only made a few brief reappearances throughout the rest of the game. Despite that, I found the game quite fun.

It isn't a perfect game, but it sure is fun. For what it's worth it's essentially a passion project from a small team to bring the Ace Combat experience to PC before 7 was announced for PC. I had fun playing the game and if you like arcade flight games, I think you'll enjoy it too!

The highest praise I can give the game is this. Any game is fun with friends. That's not the game being fun, that's your friends being fun. This game is fun solo, with randoms, or with friends. Give it a try, I think you'll thoroughly enjoy it.

Update November 25 2020
Several months later and the game is still excellent. New missions are a ton of fun. Unfortunately I have to dock some points for the amount of small bugs present in the game. Nothing game breaking, but they can get annoying after a while.

Update March 7 2021
This update is a little while after U33 landed bringing with it new dreadnoughts, some mission refinements, two new mactera, and two new biomes. I'm impressed with the new biomes, they offer a refreshing change of pace compared to the previous ones. They do stand apart however, they're more detailed than the other biomes and performance can be worse. That being said, it isn't a significant reduction and they did a fantastic job optimizing them.

Update November 23 2023
It continues to be fun.

Another great game from Supergiant Games. Very tight controls, an excellent story, and a wonderful soundtrack. I don't usually promote blind loyalty to any dev team, but supergiant games is one, if not the only one, that I would blindly follow.

Finished Doom, got a good 11 hours out of the campaign which is pretty damn good these days. Story had a predictable ending, but it's Doom, you don't play Doom for the story. Time to play it again on the hardest difficulty and get my ass kicked by the AI. I can't recommend it enough. In the day and age of realistic shooters that try to slow things down Doom accelerates everything. The entire game is an action movie. It was compared to "Mad Max Fury Road" by The Verge and I agree. Just as that movie was an example of a perfect total action movie so is Doom an example of a perfect total action game. It really holds up to the original. It's the way a sequel should be done, keeping what everyone loved and improving all the dated mechanics.

Now first off the game had potential. I say had because progress is painfully slow. I understand that the devs have had very tough times and have been screwed over countless times. I simply don't recommend the game because updates take way too long to come out, have little content (don't you dare get on with me about hell week. few of us asked for that), don't progress the goal of the game (co-op campaign but we get multiplayer instead), and add more bugs that don't get fixed. I've been optimistic with this game for too long. I can't do it anymore.

Plain and simple. It's in development hell and won't ever come out.

Since no one has wiritten a review for this DLC I guess I will.

As of right now the only features in this pack are the skins and boy do they look amazing. They are all darker themed which one would think would affect gameplay, it doesn't. The new thruster color is great to look at and the ships simply look better than the stock versions. I do believe that each ship is itself a model and has no texture file so each ship must be remodeled by hand to provide the incredible textures.

In future updates of FS you will get more ship skins (probably for the enforcer, corvete, frigate, and hunter). It will also include a medal for your profile to show that you've contributed above and beyond to help the devs. A new crew member which will sound different (maybe have a slight buff to skills, this is all still very vague). And finely XP and credit bonuses which I assume are applied at the end of games.

So should you get this? I'd say yes if you want to support the devs. It is a fairly small team developing this game and every dollar counts. Plus the skins look damn good.

Alright here's the deal. I've been a supporter of this game since November of 2014 when it was released on steam. I was one of the first players on it and I stayed through the lowest periods in the games history (♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about 53 players on a low point? Please). I saw the introduction of every single ship in the game, all of the wipes, the grind system, and now the new crew system (more grind).

This game has lost its focus. I'm not complaining about development time, I'm complaining about the direction. I bought into it knowing it was a space game with moba elements. It has those. I bought knowing it would become a competitive title. I bought knowing it would eventually transition into a f2p game. What they're doing is completely underminining the posibility of a competitive and fair game. I will explain in more detail later.

The introduction of the crew system has been the final straw for me. This system is one of the worst I've seen in a game? You got angry at tripwire for introducing crates into the game for cosmetic items? Well guess what? ECG incorporated a drop system with a 1% chance (https://www.fracturedspace.com/forums/index.php?p=/discussion/11409/drop-system-rates-for-individual-items/p1) of getting a crew member. I should point out that these crew members also alter stats. Yes, that's right. They alter and improve certain stats (3 per crew and you have 5 crew) in a positive manner (absolutely no negatives). This is in a random drop every 2 games for a max of 3 drops a day. That link contains more information. You can purchase a better chance at obtaining crew in the store for roughly 100,000 credits which is about 5 games if you do incredibly well. Or you could spend platinum, the premium currency of Fractured Space.

The other aspects of the store: Skins. Here are the prices for platinum and the prices for skins in the store. I'm going to use 'P' to stand for Platinum as it's their currency.
1000P - $5
4400P - $20
11500P - $50
25000 - $100
Regular skin (color change, like a paint job) - 990P
Legendary skin (new jump animation, model, and weapon effects. Doesn't improve stats) - 2990P
Premium ship (new model, animations, weapon effects, and a 10% xp and credit increase) - 5990P
Credit Booster (doubles credits earned at end of a match) - 60P
XP booster (doubled xp earned at end of a match) - 120P
Drop ships (the better way to get those stat altering crew members) - 345P for one or 135,000 credits.

You can read the following forum posts for more information regarding the rest of the crew system. I'm not going to cover that here.
https://www.fracturedspace.com/forums/index.php?p=/discussion/11409/drop-system-rates-for-individual-items#latest
https://www.fracturedspace.com/forums/index.php?p=/discussion/11413/so-how-does-this-new-crew-acquisition-work#latest
https://www.fracturedspace.com/fractured-space-drop-system-overview/

It's actually rather enjoyable to a degree. There's going to be 33 ships on transition to the f2p model. Almost all of them are ingame. All of them have unique looks. All of the models are incredibly well detailed.

Games take roughly 30 minutes to complete and are objective based rather than TDM. It's split into 5 sectors with 2 bases, 1 central sector that can be captured to provide a team buff, and 2 lanes on the sides where you'll do most of your combat. Each of those side lanes has 3 mining stations which provide resources. As you gather resources (it's an automatic process) you'll level up and gain flat stat increases across your ship. Gamma (the middle sector) comes online once every several minutes and serves as a way to break of the pace of the game. The team that wins gamma and captures it gains a buff that allows them to push down the lane and help capture the enemy home base.

It plays like a submarine game so you don't have 6-dof and you will never have 6-dof so don't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ask.

Balance between the ships is a joke. There are a few ships that are just better than others. While you're thinking it might be because they're higher on the tech tree I'll say that's wrong. Higher on the tree means more specialized and harder to play, not better. Regardless there are better ships and that's unfortunate. They have failed to balance these out as they are were introduced rather letting them sit in a broken state sometimes for months.

Have I mentioned the grind? For a competitive game there should be no grind. You need to grind out ships that act as counters to others. Makes sense right? Those are often further down the tech tree so it requires even more time to unlock the ships prior to give you access.

Conclusion
Frankly the game had potential. I say had because the last few updates have really been nothing but grind increases. There have been little improvements to the core gameplay experience and it really shows. The introduction of a RNG progressions system has just about done it for me and that's why I'm writing this review in hopes that you'll take a second look at this game before buying or spending your money.

Right now it's a grind fest and full of bugs that were reported multiple times. 4 months ago I would've recommended it without a second thought. I can't recommend this game to anyone looking for a fun competitive experience with capital ships.

so I started playing this and I was like WTF the whole time. All in all it was pretty fun. I'd suggest getting it. No idea how entertaining it will actually be for you but it's sure good for passing the time on a plane or while waiting on the dentist (if you're weird and bring a laptop to that. It has nice flavor with the style and adds new twists with a timer instead of grabbing all the dots (still the main goal though). It adds "sleping" ghosts which become active when you pass them and there's nothing cooler than having a massive tail of ghosts and getting the ability to eat them instead. A nice feature that's added with this remake is the ability to slow down time when you're about to be eated by a ghost. That's great for the gamer who doesn't have the fastest reflexes or simply wants to have fun. I certainly enjoyed it.