faeth

Was great for the first two thirds of the game, then they introduced an enemy that looks like a chess piece that quickly spawns other types of enemies to where you end up in an unbalanced thunderdome. On normal difficulty, the fights ended up being mostly the speedy bad guys that are meant to be countered by the shield, but after 4 or so spawn you are quickly overwhelemed. I managed to get lucky on one attempt and my bow didn’t auto target too many of the wrong statues and I cleared it, but it was just not a fun encounter like the rest. Just after, I end up at a forced stealth section that is far too slow and one mistake puts you back at the start. It feels like two different sets of level designers made the game. The pace was broken and I lost all interest in continuing. Story and feel was amazing, and the mythological aspects of this game are what made me want to keep playing. That said this would have been a 10 for me, but they dropped the baton at the end.

While the music is amazing and the visuals are definitely pretty (watching a dogfight from afar is much more fluid and natural than some other space sims I've played), I can't get past the pathetic targeting system. There are too many missions in which you need to mop up torpedoes that are once again sailing for your capital ship, and when "Target nearest in front" instead targets the interceptor about 1000 meters behind the torpedo I need to destroy before it hits said ship, I'm not longer failing a mission objective to the game difficulty so much as poor design. The missions are also very repetitive, as many have mentioned, and I don't think a difficulty curve should be represented by giving you the same objectives in mission 10 as you were getting in mission 3, but instead dropping an entire fleet with insanely accurate and powerful weaponry into the fray. It's very short-sighted design, and it was honestly disappointing. I wasn't having much difficulty with the normal objectives, mind you, just some of the special objectives that each mission has. These are essentially necessary to progress, however, as I'm not sure how you can take on the suped-up ships in the later game without the upgrades. Again, it seems poorly laid out overall, and I sorely wish the game was more satisfying than some cheaper games I've also picked up on Steam.