by Jeff Francis on Mar 11, 2011
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Heading towards a fight!
Once you create an account and log in, you must choose between the
human and Cylon faction. Once you make your choice, you’re
allowed to customize your avatar a bit. This part is low traction;
you’ll never see another player walking around in the game,
and you’ll be spending 95+% of your time in the cockpit of
your spaceship.
You’ll begin the game at your respective side’s
main base of operations – either a basestar or a battlestar.,
where you’ll receive your daily missions and the occasional
special mission. I chose to play a Cylon so I could destroy the whiny
human colonists. I…have…a…plan.
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I think that my ship is
out-classed.
On the negative side, there is no real PvE. You get a number of daily
missions from your main base, and the occasional special mission. The
daily missions entail you to scan a number of asteroids, gather a
specific amount of resources, destroy a number of non-NPC enemy ships,
fly a patrol mission through enemy space, and so on. These missions are
time consuming and are, basically, a time-sink and forced
resource-gathering. If you’re looking for epic quests,
you’ll be sorely disappointed. The thrust of the game is to
gather resources and use those resources to buy bigger ships and
weapons.
To gather resources, you have to individually scan asteroids and
planetoids. If there are some valuable resources within the scanned
item, then you have to blow it up (if it’s an asteroid) or
call in a mining ship (if it’s a planetoid) to gather the
resources. Gathering resources is extremely tedious. One extra annoying
factor is that once you scan an asteroid, no indication of
its’ scanned status appears. You only know that it has been
scanned after manually clicking on it and attempting to scan. If it has
been scanned, then your ship won’t scan it. However, when
you’re looking at a screen filled with asteroids, it gets
very easy to lose track of which asteroids have been scanned and which
haven’t.
Basically, you’ll look for areas to mine for resources and
look for fights against the opposing faction. While there are NPC ships
from time to time, you’ll do the vast majority (90+%) of your
fighting against other players. There are no scenarios, just open PvP
spread throughout the various systems.
Overall, the space combat is superb and I couldn’t get enough
of it. However, the lack of any interesting missions or PvE hurts the
gameplay. I found the daily missions to be as much fun as dumpster
diving for soda cans to turn in for pocket money. However, money
talks….which we’ll discuss in the Value section.
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If I wasn't a toaster, I would
find this beautiful.
The various ships are also extremely detailed, and from a fanboy
perspective, look damn cool. Flying inside a fleet of ships makes for
some amazing eye candy as you’ll swivel the camera around to
gawp at the other ships. Once combat is joined, you’ll see
every shot and missile coming at you. I particularly like seeing the
weapons on a larger enemy ship swiveling to shoot at me as I flew by.
(I liked the look, but not the damage I was taking!) Ship explosions
are extremely bright and very satisfying, especially if
you’re the cause of it. Plus, you can see explosions from a
pretty good distance. I’ve zeroed in on a fight many times
that were out of my radar range just because I suddenly saw a explosion
in the distance.
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This is as crowded as it's
ever going to get on a base.
Cubits are used to purchase equipment
and upgrades (you have to pay
tylium too), and a few special ships require cubits to purchase (60,000
for the medium and 175,000 for the heavy). You can gain cubits through
loot, by completing missions, and by spending real money. If you do
every single daily mission, you can gain 1400 cubits in a day. To
purchase enough tylium for a medium ship (600,000), you’ll
have to have 60,000 cubits.
You can also spend cubits for free xp. That’s
right…if you don’t want to wait and grind out
those levels, you can buy xp for cubits. You can also buy better types
of ammo and upgrade your current ship to a better version by spending
cubits. The basic cost for cubits is $2.99 for 5000 cubits, up to
$99.99 for 350,000 cubits.
As you can see, it will take you quite a while to save up for that
special ship. The bigger problem is that it makes an unfair playing
field. If somebody is willing to pay for it, they can go to town,
spending cubits on better ammo, higher upgrades to equipment, an
upgraded version of a starship, and so on. If you wanted to, you could
log into the game for the first time, buy a ton of cubits, and buy
yourself to level 20 and purchase the best starships with the best
equipment. You can even level up your skills faster by buying time
deductions for learning a skill.
While the game is free-to-play, unless you’re willing to
grind out the cubits by doing the daily missions, you will be at a
disadvantage against somebody who opens their wallet.
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Firing on a Colonist ship
filled with whiny humans.
Cons