At the moment I'm personally preferring SPAZ over this, although despite my problems with Ring Runner it still does seem rather decent, but to each their own.

I'm personally having a ton of fun with it. The variety of playstyles and things to do is fantastic, and I only just unlocked the stealth ship. Maybe whether you enjoy the controls is a question of taste, because I strongly prefer RR's scheme over SPAZ's. Unless you're moving slowly (which can be achieved by retroburning, by creating drag, by using equipment that brings you to an instant stop and seems ready to go again before you could possibly be at full speed again anyway, by being caught in a friction beam, etc.), you don't point the direction you want to go, you point the direction you need to burn to make the direction you're going point at where you want to go. It seems pretty reasonable to me, but I've also been playing lots of Kerbal Space Program lately...

I have to give a nod to the writing, too. I've seen places they could have made it irrelevant and silly, but they've kept a good balance between light-heartedness and keeping the world consistent and lending weight to things that happen. It swings from very dry and British (if you take my meaning) to a race that commonly keeps armed turrets as pets, with a Cops-like mission to kill the pets to get the enraged owners to come out of their locked up space trailers.

A solid "get it" from me, and I've become jaded to lots of games! :)

I should clarify something on my earlier comments. I mentioned a sort of "smart-pointer" for the menus, but it's really that the menus are apparently designed with the gamepad in mind. Once you use it with mouse for a while, it's intuitive enough and the cursor generally snaps to where you were going to move it anyway.

I like it so far. I feel the writing is pretty decent and has a few funny comments so far (not very far into the game yet). My only real beef with it is the lack of strafing. Yeah, I know you can kind of pull this off by using your inertia but it still bugs me.

I used to play a lot of Cosmic Rift and a game called Fleet and the overall combat and feel of the game sort of reminds me of those, which I also like.

Very nice review +1 for HereForTheBeer, and I agree completely with Kektain on the writing style, from what I've seen so far there is much humor, though most of it is in a sarcastic, dry/British sense. A few additional thoughts of my own though would be:

The game is more linear so far than I expected, having played for hours and gone through all the major ship classes (I think). I keep expecting to be let 'off the rails' so to speak, after each mission, but there is one after another.
I have another major objective/boss in the next couple of missions presuming the missions don't get sidetracked; but, even so it has been fun playing through the missions thus far.

One other thing to note which may be the cause of Onyx3173's frustration with the 'inertia' is that in some missions there seems to be a drag line which you don't get any warning about or information on ahead of time. What I mean is that in a few missions they don't have a visible timer or anything, but if you fly too fast you hit a dashed orange boundary line and your ship will stop dead and be unable to continue in that direction. That border moves though which is why it functions like a timer but restricts your movement instead. The problem arises though if you're flying much slower or in a dogfight on one of those missions and are using star or circle shaped tactics to control and attack the enemy. When the dashed orange line catches up to where your ship is it will push and/or pull you along. Fly against it and it'll stop you just like the forward line. If you get just past that line you lose all ability to move in any direction other than back to the line and if a collision object happens to be between you and the orange dashed line you are forced into the object and unable to escape in some cases no matter which direction you face or how much thrusters, afterburners or movement abilities you use, which at least in the couple of cases where it happened to me I first realized my ship wasn't flying under my control, then if I got caught against an object the constant drag or pull of the line will actually destroy you since it seems to respond the same as if you were flying repeatedly into the object.

I believe the orange line to just be a border line for the mission area. On most missions that is fine you wouldn't need to fly out of those borders unless you were trying to go to deep space, there were only 2 or 3 missions I recall from my experience so far where this border moves and drags you along or prevents you from moving forward.

Hopefully there aren't too many of those, since even if an objective is moving, like an escort ship, target, etc, I would much prefer to lose the mission because I couldn't keep up or lost track of it in combat than to unexpectedly lose control and sometimes be smashed up against objects. Once I died a couple times like this I was able to restart those missions and stay within the moving boundaries without an issue, but not knowing ahead of time that there was going to be that limitation I found frustrating.

Outside of those minor complaints though (and I consider them minor regardless of the depth of detail I've tried to describe them), I love the variety of ships and abilities and look forward to being able to explore more options of what modules to bring with and how to customize the ship once I'm free of the mission restrictions (presuming you do get free at some point). I know you can do some customization from the main menu, but I'm hoping that isn't all there is since I see great potential for the game in terms of those customizations and the RPG-esque of collecting loot and equipment and using different combinations and upgrades. Just hoping I get to that point soon!

I definitely was able to improve my flying by modifying the graphic options slightly from the default to make my ship brighter and enemies slightly darker, kudos on the variety of options there, though would have been helpful to have mouseover explanations for what the different sliders do, since their names are pretty clear but it's not obvious which direction on the sliders does what, so some experimentation may be needed.

I definitely see similarities with SPAZ and Star Control in terms of how combat plays out, even if movement is different. I particularly like the 'burst' type movement abilities, though I'm not sure how well I like having to hold a modifier button/key and then do a directional sweep to trigger them. Would make more sense to me if they just triggered along the direction one's ship was facing (kind of like the Rogue's teleport ability), though a bit more use and they may become second nature. I do see there may be tactical advantages to not having to turn to a specific facing before activation though, so we'll see after more playtime if it's a good thing or no.

I do wish I could use my additional mouse buttons for mapping controls though, seems like just M1, M2 and Scrollwheel/M3 are recognized. Or at least I was having trouble getting it to recognize them on my mouse. Personally I don't hardly ever click my mousewheel M3 button, I usually reset whatever mappings are defaulted there to my mouse thumb buttons. Hopefully M4, M5 additional mouse button mappings like that will be available at some point with an update.

Hey BlueKronos,

Thanks for writing such a thoughtful review of the game so far. To touch on a few points, the second half of the campaign becomes non linear. Mouse buttons 4 and 5 should be supported. We are working on making the "forced scroll" missions a bit more clear as we have now seen a couple of let's plays where it confuses the player.

Good additions, BlueKronos!

The boundary line got me a couple times, too. If you get stuck in one you might be able to escape if your ship has a zip or teleport special on it. For instance (maybe spoiler?), I got caught a couple times in the stealth ship (Rogue? Vex? I forget) but was able to escape using its special movement abilities. One other time I escaped by using the boost (turbo, whatever) to get out.

For key mapping, have you tried playing around with the options in the main menu? I took a look but didn't alter any of them so I'm not sure how much flexibility is offered there. Myself, since I fly with the mouse, I'm thinking about reassigning the A, S, W, and D keys as only W is used for now.

As you suggested, I do need to mess with the ship colors and brightness. When your little vessel gets thrown around, even with the vector line as an aid it can get a little disorienting.

Later on you'll get to config your ships with a whole mess of options, and it sounds like that list grows a lot more yet later in the game. I'm currently stuck on one boss mission where I've been going through several archetypes to try to figure out how to beat it. The cool thing is that there ARE all of those options, and that they present a wide variety of play-styles among them. The bad side is that I still haven't found that combination to beat her.

Great, thanks for the update. I'll try the mouse buttons again and look forward to the 2nd half of the single player campaign!

And HereForTheBeer, yes I looked through the mapping options and changed one or two things but at that point hadn't played far enough along to know what most of the controls meant. I should go back through when I next get a chance to play and see if I can set other keys now that I know more of what to expect.

And I agree, having a lot of available options and combinations makes for a great deal of playability, so glad to hear that I can look forward to that soon.

Starts off and is dreadfully horrible in every way imaginable for the first hour or so.

Upon changing out your first ship you'll immediately notice that you're no longer running to options trying to select a satisfactory control method for game pad. This goes to show the tremendous difference in game play different ships and equipment can make.

After two hours in once you've unlocked the Hangar, Shop and other modes this is easily one of the best games on PC.