[ColdSteel]

I think a lot of people are completely missing what kind of game genre Starfury fits into.

Starfury is basically Diablo in space. It's, at heart, a simple space CRPG. It's all about the stuff; getting better ships and equipment, boosting stats, solving quests and becoming the baddest deathdealer in the galaxy. If you don't like very open-ended CRPGs, and instead like traditional space sims, I don't think you'll be that happy with the game.

Starfury is NOT a space sim. I think MM wanted it to be simple to play and not require a joystick or game controller to do so. It does require a bit of dexterity but most of the decisions made in combat are tactical and the results are usually not much dependant on eye-hand coordination. I think this was a good decision based on the number of complaints I've seen about collisions. I don't think anyone who has played any flight based based games is going to be having trouble running into stuff in this game. I sure haven't.

By keeping the flight model very simple, they make the game more accessible to the turn based strategy crowd (read SE4 players). After all, MM wants to apply this engine to SE5.

I think it is a good engine. The graphics are quite good for a company with the resources that MM has to work with. I commend them. I think it's great fun.

The moddability of the game is staggering. While the stock campaigns and game framework may be fairly vanilla, and there isn't a whole lot of depth there yet, I expect that to change. It's as if MM has built a very customizable framework for a whole game universe and sketched in just the highpoints. What happens next is up to the modders. Personally, I expect some fantastic mods once everyone figures out how to go about it.

The one thing that I wish MM had done was to provide more information on the mod specs. Lack of information will not deter the diehard SE4 modders in the slightest, but it will slow down the newcomers quite a bit until some examples or tutorials are posted.

Overall, I really like this game and hope that MM continues to flesh it out. I hope they don't just consider this an experiement for SE5 and abandon it as a game. Frankly, right now I'm having more fun with Starfury than I did with SE4.

My 2 cents,

-ColdSteel