Bay 12 Games Forum

Bump for glory!

Also this game had a few updates since anyone posted last but right now is in hiatus as the developer is working on a new game (which he wants money for, the monster!). 

Gripes are that it's very much grinding and if your going to do personal combat you will almost definitely need to be saving and loading after dying lots, however to be fair the grinding gripe pretty much applies to all the spaced based open world games so I can easily live with it.

However it has nice pro's that it has a personal combat as well as spaceship combat so you can not only blow enemy ships out of space but instead board them, capture the crew as slaves and steal their cargo without most of it being blow up if the ship blows up. It also has quests which can be created by other people and you can run to get interesting scenarios to appear, perhaps even a full fledged campaign.

The combat is fairly fun but the system can seem a bit clunky as you can set the game speed from super slow to super fast in a 1-9 range and you will be needing to alter the game speed as sometimes in combat you need to slow it down to react quick enough and then conversely you will need to speed it up out of combat to make travelling through lots of star systems less of a chore. The personal combat has an interesting ranged mechanic which requires lots of manual aiming and lots of luck but allows you to aim your own shots to decide whether you want to headshot the enemy or shoot their arms to try and disarm them or their legs to slow them down.

Still overall I would say it's quite a fun game but does suffer from all open world space sims of being grindy until you get to a level where nothing is really a challenge, but luckily if you get to that stage in ascii sector you can make quests to create your own challenging challenges.