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Icarus is right: could have flown, but sinks like a stone

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: June 13, 2007
Author: Amazon User

A wasted opportunity. "It could have been a champion."

Pro: Amazing potential

Con: Provox hired a incompetent and zero-experience novice to do the high-level game design, destroying the game in the process.

It's just criminal to take a game with so much potential and just torpedo it in such an obscene manner. What's really amazing is how much effort went into the game on the basic stuff -- engine, art, etc. -- and how little effort went into directing this to a great gaming experience. In the grand scheme of things, it takes relatively little money to hire a good writer/designer, compared to the rest of the investment. If only they had done that, this game would absolutely sing. As it is, it sinks like a stone.

The game really does not play well. There's a lot of unpolished and apparently untested aspects of the game. For instance navigation is very difficult/tedious. You cannot set waypoints or ride in tradelanes, autopilot doesn't work, and it takes like 5-10 minutes (in real time) for the jump drive to recharge. So traveling from point A to point B is about as tedious as sitting there watching a large file download from the internet.

It's difficult to believe that the game was betatested before it was released. The assumption would be that the publisher rushed the game towards the end, but that doesn't explain the horrible choices they made about the writing. Being rushed doesn't imply that you'll hire somebody who is horribly underqualified and incompetent.

They hired an incompetent 19-year-old student with zero experience to do the entire mission design and writing. He did even worse than you'd imagine. Here's the mission outline for the first two missions of the main campaign:

Mission 1:
Perform a dogfight against two ships. (highly difficult)
Perform a "scan" five times in a row. (highly tedious)

Mission 2:
Perform a dogfight against one ship.

Yes, that's it. Zero thought went into this. I'm not even going to get started on how bad the writing is. As another reviewer said, "A Saturday morning cartoon looks like Hamlet in comparison with the story." (Brett Todd -- gamesradar.com)

There's no tutorial of any kind, and learning how to deal with the command interface is awkward. And even once you get good at it, it's still awkward. For instance, every time you tractor in some goods (from a kill), you have to go to the inventory menu to select which ones you'll keep. There's no way to select "take all" by default. So every single kill essentially requires a tedious menu to deal with.

Some may believe that a patch will fix major problems, but the major problems are so major that this is exceedingly unlikely. They would have to rewrite the entire campaign, for example. That's not something one can simply patch.

The game is badly balanced. On discussion boards everywhere people are complaining that it's really difficult to win the very first battle. This is because the developers didn't try to make the game playable, let alone enjoyable. (From a game-design point of view, the first mission is supposed to show you how to play the game; it's not supposed to be a highly difficult trial.)

From a "bare simulation" point of view, the game is playable, and a patch might even make it enjoyable in a very limited sense, although the stuff that *badly* needs fixing will never be fixed by a patch.

But even if the game becomes playable, I recommend boycotting the game. Developers need to learn that it's not cool to destroy a game with so much potential. -- That post-purchase concerns like "fun" are as important as pre-purchase advertising. The writer needs to be fired immediately. And the person who hired him needs to be shot at dawn.

Do not even consider buying this game until you have tried the demo! You'll easily see from the demo how badly the game is designed.

Great Game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 14
Date: June 16, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is quite enjoyable if you like the idea of being dropped into a universe with 40+ huge sectors that you can explore. I've played so far for 20+ hours as a trader. The RPG aspects are great as you pick and choose the areas of your ship you wish to level up, such as shield, speed, jammer, cargo space, etc. Also depending upon your occupation you can have up to 3 wingmen which allows you to do some of the harder missions, such as destroying buildings (in space). I've never seen a game implement a better use of using the mouse to fly and for combat. I've played everything from X3 to Freelancer but this is clearly the best. No joystick is necessary. I've got close to 100,000 credits in the bank from steady trading between various systems and trading with trade ships. Now I can buy a fighter craft which can be upgraded to higher levels than my trading ship. The graphics are awesome. I've played on my 46 inch plasma at 1024 x 768 and the game looks awesome. X3 was way to boring and the pace was too slow, Freelancer was fun, but exploring was restricted. This game is the best of both worlds. And if you like Space Rangers 2 (a 2D game), this is as close as you can get to Space Rangers 2, and have full 3D. Sure the manual is minimal but it's still covers all the basic stuff. Now go have some fun people!

Save your money!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: February 18, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game is poorly made, improperly documented and plays like junk. I can't say enough bad things about this game.
I have played many space fighter games in my day and this is the worst!
Buy X2 or TARR Chronicles, both are superior games and worth the money spent on them.

SFRU Sucks

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: June 30, 2007
Author: Amazon User

The controls are just awful and trying to learn them is worse then X-series or even Battle Cruiser. The Graphics suck I compared the graphics to those of Freelancer and the game play of Freelancer and this game does not compare to Freelancer a 5-year-old game. Game play is not fun but tedious, it has so many bugs you cannot even complete the game.

I give advice to all save your money and buy something else, as this is a waste of money.

Not up to par with others of the genre, UGLY GRAPHICS!

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 23
Date: June 03, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Wow, here I am taking my flight test, and wham, who would have thought... pirates appear. Jesus guys, where's the troll guarding the bridge? You couldn't have thought of something actually original?

And man o man is it that hard to find people that speak English clearly and can give the thing some sincere emotion?

The children running animations, well, honestly, look like they were done by someone learning 3D Studio MAX that grabbed a canned motion file.

The texturing on those kids faces turned me off completely. I struggled with that, got over it and thought to myself, so "OK I turn off the intro, who really cares if the rest works."

Sure, the game runs fine, no glitches, no problem at all with all settings on high. Unless of course I take into account actual visual content... because no matter how much MIP mapping, vertex shading, or how many anisotropic milkshakes you throw at a cow, it is, unavoidably just a cow.

And speaking of which... I'm not too happy with the graphics level presented. The 'blurry radar' I don't like at all. One of the primary functions of a HUD is clarity and the communication of absolute situation awareness. The radar pips are blurry, unclear and having to switch between modes to distinguish between ships and buildings is silly. When different colors or icons would do. Instead of those ball-lighting blobs.

The textures on the buildings is horrendous. The bump mapping is WAY too high. It looks as if all the buildings were exposed to 3000 years of meteor bombardment. Space age modern tech stone bump mapping, sorry.

It has it's good points...
I found the flight model adequate its a relief to not have to use a joystick.

The sound is good, music perhaps a bit too upbeat, considering the many hours spent in this type of game... toning it down would avoid having to turn it off as I've had to.

Back to the bad points since they tend to remain in memory longer...
The voice acting, well, honestly, is the worst I've ever heard in the genre! get some professional voice actors, ones that can actually give a sentence more inflection and emotion than R2D2.

The character visuals are no more than plastered image of a pilot, totally devoid of any lip & head movements. Heck even Wing Commander had more life-infused people in the game.

When playing the game the words that comes to mind are 'UGLY' & 'BLURRY'. High tech machine should present a pilot with crispness and clarity... at the moment the dash in my SUV is clearer.

First this I do when I have time is return this game.

no good:-(

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: January 07, 2008
Author: Amazon User

The game didn't work right in my system. I had all the system requirements yet the graphics were all screwed up, you couldn't see the game when you played it! Bad business, fast delivery but bad product!

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