Cosmoteer: Starship Architect & Commander (Early Access)
When I first saw this game, it looked like it might just be about designing and building starships to play around with. I'm glad to say there's a whole universe to explore and it's one of those games people compare to Freelancer. Except that here, you don't just save up millions to buy a new ship, you can build EVERYTHING on your ship out of parts, from the ground up. It's really engaging to build your own ship and experiment with what works. Early Access updates have been frequent, with good communication - and it looks like they're working on a large 2.0 update to overhaul the universe too.
Pros
- Excellent tutorial
- Great controls for moving the ship around
- You can target specific parts of enemy ships to blow off
- You can change the speed of time to skip long boring travel times
- You can salvage ships that you destroy to upgrade your own
- Lots of customisation options for a new game, such as galaxy size, salvaging, removing exploration, difficulty settings
- Your ship isn't just a set of parts like in Reassembly or Starcom Nexus - you actually have crew running around. When you salvage things, your crew does an EVA to fetch the parts. Those salvaged parts are physically stored on your ship. If you get attacked while salvaging, you have to call your crew back to your ship before you can leave
- Keeping in line with the realistic angle - munitions must be carried by crew from their storage to the gun. You have to think about where your storages are, not just that they exist
- Full refunds when you remove ship parts
- When you trade with a station, they physically transfer the goods from the ship to yours
- You can give your crew roles, and assign those roles to rooms. This lets you put gunners near guns, and forbid them to carry stuff around
- Probably the most customiseable control scheme in any game I've played. Everything can be changed / turned off
Cons
- While I understand the "everything must be connected logistically" theme, I think it's strange that your ship's reactor doesn't automatically power everything on the ship. Instead, the reactor produces batteries, which have to be carried to parts.
- It appears to be impossible to manoeuvre during combat. You can either tell your ship to attack, or move, so you can't manually evade / turn and shoot
- A lot of menus are hidden behind right-clicking certain things, which isn't obvious