I bought this game a long time ago, but my first playthrough stalled out when I hit the difficulty spike in Chapter 3. Recently I finally got around to starting over and playing it all the way through.

If you like Spacewar-style combat, you'll love this game, because that's pretty much all there is. Jump to a map, blow up everything with a red icon, repeat over and over and over for hours on end. There are some other missions, and elements of leveling-up your ship and supporting fleet, and a very basic story layered on top, but it's mostly just top-down spaceship dogfights.

The first two chapters go by fairly quickly, but then you get to Chapter 3 and hit a wall. You'll spend what seems like forever grinding for upgrades because those inner systems are tough if you didn't do that grind already. Then you get to Chapter 4 and there's a totally different kind of grind, which I won't talk about for spoilery reasons. (But here's a tip: for the most part, you don't need to worry about the UTA bases in Ch. 4. Once I figured that out, I mostly breezed through to the end.)

Also, if you're playing on a modern Windows, you may need to adjust your compatibility settings for the game to work properly. You can find threads about that on the forum.

All in all, I'm giving it a thumbs-up because I (mostly) enjoyed it. Just be warned that it's very much a niche game, not something that will appeal to everybody.

I bought this game a long time ago, but my first playthrough stalled out when I hit the difficulty spike in Chapter 3. Recently I finally got around to starting over and playing it all the way through. If you like Spacewar-style combat, you'll love this game, because that's pretty much all there is. Jump to a map, blow up everything with a red icon, repeat over and over and over for hours on end. There are some other missions, and elements of leveling-up your ship and supporting fleet, and a very basic story layered on top, but it's mostly just top-down spaceship dogfights. The first two chapters go by fairly quickly, but then you get to Chapter 3 and hit a wall. You'll spend what seems like forever grinding for upgrades because those inner systems are tough if you didn't do that grind already. Then you get to Chapter 4 and there's a totally different kind of grind, which I won't talk about for spoilery reasons. (But here's a tip: for the most part, you don't need to worry about the UTA bases in Ch. 4. Once I figured that out, I mostly breezed through to the end.) Also, if you're playing on a modern Windows, you may need to adjust your compatibility settings for the game to work properly. You can find threads about that on the forum. All in all, I'm giving it a thumbs-up because I (mostly) enjoyed it. Just be warned that it's very much a niche game, not something that will appeal to everybody.