Review
Dynamic space combat with an engaging story about a crew of outcasts. Experimenting with the loadout keeps the missions interesting and varied.
The flight controls are the strong point. Ships have real weight and inertia, and cutting the engines to drift along a curve while keeping your weapons on target never stops being satisfying. The loadout system is where the game opens up: weapons, hull modules and crew skills interact in ways the game does not explain directly, and stumbling on a combination that completely changes your approach to a mission happens often. Two sorties with the same ship class may not resemble each other at all. Between missions the crew of outcasts argues, negotiates and occasionally walks away — and those conversations feed directly into the skills available to you.
The characters are written with enough humour to stay likeable, and enough friction to stay interesting, and losing someone you built a loadout around genuinely hurts. Mission variety drops somewhat in the final act, and the difficulty curve rises sharply just before the last set of encounters, but neither undermines the whole. A strong recommendation for anyone who wants space combat with a bit of character — and who likes tinkering with configurations until a sortie finally comes together.