Underspace Reviews

Currently I can't recommend Underspace, but with the emphasis on 'currently' as it has potential to become a great game. The game really feels like Freelancer, both in a positive and negative sense - and this is coming from someone who played hundreds of hours of Freelancer back in the day. The UI takes a little too much from the original Freelancer UI. I mean, I get you want to make it look like Freelancer but now that we have gotten used to less invasive UIs, this UI is absolutely horrendous. Way to much stuff and also obscuring like half of the screen. On an ultrawide, the UI is also not on the sides of the screen but situated where it would be on 16:9 which moves it almost to the center. Performance is an issue. The game runs at 100 fps+ but while turning the camera that feels like 40-50 fps. There is something wrong there making the game not feel as smooth as it should be. Voice acting (maybe understandable in this stage) is either absent completely or WIP. At least the WIP parts are shown to the player but it needs to be mentioned nonetheless. No support for good AA techniques. The game only supports FXAA which gives it a very blurry look, at least MSAA or DLSS should be supported. Exchanging your ship with another sells ALL your equipment, it does not transfer it to the new ship. All of a sudden I had no weapons, no equipment, nothing. That shouldn't happen. Personal opinion, but I'm not a fan of the music. It feels like music that should be in a classic fantasy game but isn't fitting for a space exploration game. TL;DR: Personally, I think the game is a little undercooked currently and I am going to wait until at least a couple of larger patches fix these issues or (more likely) until the full game releases.

If you liked the Freelancer game - At least wishlist this one. I don't think I've ever written a review for a game before, but I think this game is actually worthwhile. For 15 years or more I've been keeping an eye out for a Freelancer successor (I pirated the original Freelancer and finished it like 4 times, but it's gotten boringly easy, at this point; there's only so much content in the game) Anyway, THIS game is the one I've been waiting for. It's already pretty good and playable but it's got the potential to really be an S-tier game when it's complete. It feels and plays like Freelancer in all the ways I wanted. Some of it is not so user-friendly, right now, and I found myself struggling to begin with, but there's enough stuff on Google and Reddit and such that I got through it.

A lot of placeholder content still here, but a fantastic game if you can look past that. Combat feels good, exploration is fun, and the universe is surprisingly fleshed out (even if most of the lore/worldbuilding is weirdly hard to access in-game). If you read this Trainwiz, please... let me play an Ast, I beg of you!