faetal on 3/7/2013 at 11:47

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So I've been playing Stardrive for the past 2 days while ill. It's very good. It actually reminds me a lot of Imperium Galactica II, which is my favourite 4x game ever. It still needs some things ironed out - some of the controls are VERY janky (so if you tell your ships to retreat to the nearest shipyard for repairs and re-fuelling, they do so, then immediately return to whatever they were doing previously, even if that was getting destroyed by a superior fleet.

The way the ship designs work is very cool. Your modules get damaged based on where projectiles hit and as a result, your placement of armour plates directly protects them - we're not talking the simple addition of hit points (though the modules themselves have hitpoints) to the whole ship, or just to the front of the ship - we're talking 'if your gun is struck by a railgun round, your gun takes damage' vs '...your armour plate takes the damage'. The fact that you can tell each ship how to attack is good too, so you can ask it to fly towards the enemy in runs (good for fast ships), turn so the front is facing the enemy (good for large ships with lots of forward facing weapons) or you can tell the ship to keep port or starboard facing the enemy, which lets you treat e.g. a long frigate like a galleon, with auxillary modules on one side and a row of fixed directional weapons on the other. It's really great. You can have massive capital ships with giant mass drivers and fusion cannons facing forward in a fixed arc, turning to keep the target in its firing line while various flax cannons, MLRS pods and point defense guns guard its rear and flanks from faster ships and projectiles. Exactly what you want from space combat.

The research, diplomacy and trade are fairly light touch, so probably doesn't have the depth that some would prefer. Still, an excellent buy for £14.99.