Void Destroyer 2

I'll be honest. I completely underestimated this 10$ game. It's a fun and surprisingly expansive space strategy and retro "flight" sim. It starts you out in the typical small fighter ship barely capable of taking on basic enemies, and lets you follow the main story to unlock more and more things to do and ships to control. There's a obvious and basic satisfaction in growing more and more powerful as you progress. And its playable on some pretty low spec computers. From a first glance, I thought this would be a super simplified space sim that had a strategy element tacked on top, but after only a few hours playing you'll find every vehicle has upgrade slots and additional abilities. Different vehicle types allow for fun experimentation and playstyles. allowing you to enjoy everything from fighter gameplay, gunship - frigate combat, all the way up to destroyers, carriers, and etc. I recommend nabbing the DLC's as they are well worth it, and adds different start situations to change how you progress and the best ways to do so. There are definitely ways to cheese or ease your time playing, min-maxing the campaign can be pretty easy all things considered. But the end game can be rathe…

Unfun gameplay. Small ships circle you around so you spend a lot of time just turning trying to aim your weapons at a target. You are always outnumbered, so while you chase one ship others just blow you up. Every fight boils down to afterburning away from group, turning around, doing a pass, maybe doing some damage, then afterburning away again. You use shield recharge ability and just run from the fight while it's on cooldown. I started with a DLC that gives you different starting ships (Ashes) and those ships have 'auto aim' weapon projectiles. Problem with that is, the projectiles try to hit enemies into their rear, which means small ships just simply outrun the projectiles.... Upgraded into bigger ship in DLC, which was even worse, slower with lower weapon range, can't even chase after smaller ships, have to sit and wait for your 'secondary' weapons to come off cooldown, since they have longer range.

just get this alongside vd2 rebalanced mod,best mod ever which brought back the vd1 ships,also made the dlc ships available for npcs and outsiders in sandbox ps:also make sure to use a ram cleaner program,cuz this game is quite a ram hog after playing a while

Despite the frequent crashing the autosave is frequent enough and fast enough that restarting and getting back Into it is pretty quick. Game runs very well when it isn't crashing which is something I appreciate after playing X4. I am very impressed for what I think is a solo dev project, pretty much scratching that space sim/empire management itch on a simplified quicker gameplay and much better feeling combat too. Story mode spoilers ahead: [Spoiler]Otherwise very much enjoyed the playthrough of the base game even if the finale kind of felt like the game trying to shoo you out the door with the alien fleet incursions begin trampling everything you don't micromanage yourself while your income starts dropping. You basically will start losing the war to attrition.[/spoiler] Detail Free TLDR: Don't expect to sit around at the end enjoying your empire very much if you are playing on story mode and progressing to the end.

I wish i could recommend it. Its really confusing. You start in the middle of a battle but dont know anything so you get destroyed. ok you try again and this time make it a little further ok cool And then you get killed or get stuck not knowing where to go or what to do. Maybe its just me but i'd like to know how to play the games i buy. I have hundreds of games i havent touched and i wont try any that require you to figure it out. People say this is like x4 but i wouldnt know. I survived the battle and had no markers of anykind. No hey come to this station or hey come do this activity. I had no idea where i was or what i was doing so i gave up and moved on. 400+ games i dont have time to try and figure out how to play a game i bought. if you cant make a tutorial get me there then i dont need this game.

a bit on the slow developing side, but if you keep at it will reward you with an intriguing game that has a few surprises.