Re: Anyone here played Starshatter?
I tried the Starshatter demo a few days ago and was actually quite impressed. I'll probably spend a couple more play sessions analyzing it before deciding whether to take the plunge, but that's mainly because I'm finicky and my spare time is limited. Basically I thought it looked extremely good, and did a lot of things much better (or perhaps, mainly much more to my personal tastes) than other games with similar elements.
It's certainly a completely different game from the Space Empires series, since it's a ship command simulation rather than a space conquest game.
It's also a much different (but closer than SE) genre to Star Fury, in that Star Fury more closely follows a free-agent roleplaying formula.
Anyway, the things I really liked about what I saw in the Starshatter demo included:
* Detailed ship damage model with fairly complex inter-system dependencies (though I will be analysing it a bit more, and seeing if repair times can be modded up and hull damage modded down, for more fun with derelicts).
* Newtonian ship movement that doesn't seem excessively acrobatic or dumbed down (though I will be analysing it a bit more, too).
Things I specifically thought Starshatter did well that really put me off Star Fury:
* Vastly more realistic scale - space is not cluttered, planets are way bigger than ships, ships and fighters seem to have more appropriate relative sizes, and the space and time for maneuver seem much more appropriate.
* Better distinctions between ship classes. They seem much more appropriate in scale and abilities and limitations based on size and role, as opposed to Star Fury where the different ship classes seem more like "power ups" or RPG "character classes" or "levels".
* Better feel in the destroyer squadron demo scenario of captaining a large ship and leading a squadron, while Star Fury seems more like piloting a suped up star fighter (or bumper car in space) and constantly having to do things like dodge obstacles.
* Seemingly appropriate roles, situations, and equipment for a military ship, as opposed to Star Fury's "you are an undercover ship captain who runs errands to earn credits to upgrade your equipment completely at will and do whatever you want". That's a question of genre, and I do like free agent games like Omnitrend's Universe or Elite, but in Starshatter it seems like the roles and ships and situations make sense (in the demo anyway) while in Star Fury I'm left incredulous about most of the content.
* The movement of the ships, especially the larger ones, seems much more correct in Starshatter.
PvK
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