eXoSpace Combat Engineer

This game scratches an itch I've had for a long time. My history includes the freeware shoot-em-up Fraxy, the online shmup Bubble Tanks, and the freeware RTS Battleships Forever. Of them, I compare it most to Battleships Forever. Fully customizable ship building, a classic top-down shooter feel and control, and good performance even on a laptop not optimized for gaming. Been looking for a game like this for a long time, and very pleased to have found this one. Hoping it keeps going for a long time yet.

Quite a fun and well put together little game. Love the flexibility of the building system.

Coming from Starsector(heavily modded at that), few spaceship games could hold a candle to that monstrosity. Notably, heavily modded Starsector lacks one thing: fully customizable shipbuilding. Its something that stands out as a very noticable lack, despite all of it. This is something Exospace does really well, and has enough attachment gimmicks to keep it interesting for a long while. Ease of creation to put new enemy ships into the game is a plus, too. The game also sports modding tools(which are growing) to add new part types and other enhancements. I've seen others draw references to Reassembly, as well, for shipbuilding basis. Of note for more casual playstyles: the game doesn't have permanent part loss like Terratech or Cosmoteer. Parts you've added regenerate over time while out of combat, meaning the ship built acts like a template for autorepair to get back to, rather than having to reassemble the ship piece-by-piece or load from template over and over(Terratech). Bas is a very active developer in the community on the Discord, and very responsive to bugreports and suggestions! Make sure to check out the Experimental branch if you're curious what's coming in the m…

I've never played Reassembly, but I've heard about it. This game took a little while to figure out, but once I got the hang of how all the ship parts work and balancing power, mass, and thrust, I was able to start building some cool vessels. On balance, it's lots of fun.

Fun-per-minute: Really high.

TL;DR: With what I've tried of this game and its gameplay loop, I simply cannot recommend this game. It lacks any form of challenge and feels lackluster compared to what it tries to copy. In the two hours it took me to get through my first mission (Bounty), I never once felt threatened. The game simply lacks challenge, even when you only have access to a mere handful of blocks. Most zones in the Bounty contains a handful of weak NPCs that you can kill very easily, and unless you are already at a bad standing with the zone's faction, you can kill almost all of the NPCs in the zone before they try to retaliate. Jumping into a hostile zone poses no threat, each enemy spawns spread out over the zone, meaning they approach you individually, letting you kill the first one before the next is even close to being in range. Even the big bad boss of the Bounty never once posed a threat. The bullet hell was negated entirely by point defence weapons, the big lasers on the boss didn't do enough damage nor frequently enough to pose the risk of defeat, the fighters that the boss tried to throw at me were so weak half of them didn't even get to fly towards my ship before powering down (which I di…