Star Assault

[Harrison]

Oh cool. Thanks for finding that. The screenshots like quite good. Not amazing but pretty nice.

[Buleste]

The babylon Project looks better and thats free. Although it can be a pig to get mods for.

[Harrison]

The Babylon Project definitely does look good, and as you say it is completely free, being developed using the free freespace 2). I've not tried the beta release out yet, but thanks to you reminding me of the project I definitely will be when i get chance.

But, the more space games we get the better, so I'm also going to give Star Assault a try too to see if it is any good. I'm not bothered if the graphics are a few years out of date compared to current standards, it's the gameplay that matters.

[Buleste]

TBP is on its final release with the download including a couple of mods various installers and promises of new mods all the time. It is a hefty download at about 1GB but it is worth it.

[Harrison]

Nice. I will definitely give it a try when I get chance.

[Harrison]

So I got hold of a copy of Star Assault and installed it... and I can report that it isn't worth bothering with.

The graphics are OK but quite dated. The backdrops look ok, as do the lighting effects, but they wouldn't have won any awards even 5 years ago.

The problems however start when you actually play the game. You start off by having to equip your ship by dragging components from the store into your ship's sections (engine, reactor, shields, weapons etc). The game doesn't tell you that you have to do this though so I tried to start the first mission and was given the message "your CPU isn't powerful enough" which confused me as it wasn't referring to the CPU in the computer, but the game rather confusingly called the ship you fly a CPU. So after realising this and equipping the ship it let me start the first mission. And oh boy, the animated guy reading out the mission briefing is very amateur looking, but at least the voice over isn't so bad.

Once the first mission began the usual intercom commands from the space station (which is common with many space games) began, directing me to an asteroid field where I would find some enemies to take out. Sounds like the usual first mission stuff. But the controls. Umm... very basic. The mouse controls the direction of the ship, with the left mouse firing the currently selected weapon and the mouse wheel zooming the view in and out (all that actually seems to do is scale the ship). The rest of the basic controls are keyboard based, with the Page Up and Down keys controlling engine power, the 1-0 keys selecting the current weapon, F1 turning auto pilot on, C switching between external and cockpit view, and a couple of other things.

Now the control problems. First you move the mouse and the ship shows some thrusters firing to move the ship, but where are the physics? The movement of the ship feels like it is stuck to the front of your view and you are rotating as if this view were a turrent. So it feels like you are rotating the game's view like a first person shooter, with a space ship stuck on the front of the view where the cross hair should be. Very strange and it doesn't work.

Anyway, I thought I would try out the first mission, so I hit F1 and let the autopilot take me to the destination, which it did. Some reference points appeared in the area showing the location of the enemies, who started to close in and fire at me. I started to shoot back but then I noticed something else. How are you meant to aim at something without a cross hair? I basically had to fire and see where the bullet spray was going and then try to guess where to line the ship up to hit the enemy. But that wasn't that easy with the enemies yo-yoing around me going from 800m away, then flying past and going off away from me again. I got the shields of two of the ships right down but it was very had to hit them and they just kept hitting my ship until it exploded! This was the first mission to teach you some basics, and yet the enemy were shooting non stop constantly depleting my shield. Mad!

At which point I quit the game!

So to sum up, definitely not a good example of a space combat game. It is in no way on a par with X-Wing or Wing Commander, and is in no way comparable to something like Freespace 2! I'm off to play Freelancer and X3 instead...

[Tiago]

Like i thoght... it didn't smell good...

Freespace 2 ? Never play it, is it like homeworld 2?