I'd like to start off by saying I am a loyal Malfador Machinations customer, I love SE II, III and IV, and own all three of them, and in fact continue to play both III and IV, time permitting. So it was considerable intrest that I was waiting for the demo of StarFury, and the final product.
Some other folks have complained about the graphics. I'd like to say that I don't care about graphics if the gameplay is solid, non-buggy, and intresting.
However, eaither the demo is ultra limited and is very stripped down in terms of AI and features, or StarFury really misses that mark.
The action is entirely 2D. Space is 3D.
Normally in a sim where the space is 2D, ships AI seemly goes "over" another ship, to prevent a collision. Not in SF; no, the AI on the enemy ships seems to be so bad, that they actually try to hit you. I had to have reloaded my game 20-30 times because of enemy cruisers/destoryers ramming me.
Balance is another issue; the low end missions that only pay 10K credits, expect you to take a low level destoryer up against high level cruisers and destoryers.
The "destory Clan X" missions, are typically 1 Cruiser/2 Destoryers per clan, and are almost impossible to defeat.
There's a littanty of other issues with it, but it seems to me like this is almost a tech demo, or some sort of alpha copy. Its not what I've come to expect from MM. I'm not sure if the MM devs read these forums, or what have you, but if one of them does, please, for the love of God, fix the ramming issue, and the balance issues. I can overlook just about everything else - and so can the other SE players, but getting rammed 30 times in 2 hours is just frustrating to the point I'm about to delete the thing off my hard drive and go play some Freespace 2.
Colonel Yoseph