Starway Fleet Reviews

I bought this on sale - it is a nice little co-op experience for one evening and as such it was worth its money. Lack of co-op content is a pity though. @dev please open this up to the community so they can create more content. Pros: - There are not many casual co-op games like this (I would love to see a co-op star wars story campaign) - (to me) Steep but motivating learning curve - Different enemy ship layouts to "learn" - Co-op missions that require coordination - Configurable controls for keyboard/mouse, gamepad, flight controller - Ship / level design Cons: - Game feedback (you never know where your team mates are, It is at first somewhat difficult to understand what the game wants from you / where to go, no level statistics) - Lack of content (co-op playtime only like 2-3 hours, no real story, no ship upgrades or anything like it) - Sound design

I played the demo before for a while and I picked the game up not long ago. The gameplay is great, it reminds me of the X-Wing series. The graphics and audio quality is extremely good as well. Right now there are six missions but I'm sure there is a lot more to come. Absolutely recommended!

Fun concept, but the flight controls are just unplayable. It's jerky and unresponsive and almost impossible to manuever accurately enough to dogfight, which is the entier point of the game.

I'm a 90's space shooter fan, so everthing I play is going to go up against titles like X Wing, Tie Fighter and Freespace series - a game which I still play today. Starway Fleet is arcadey. And not in a fun way. Frustrating and frighteningly simple, with jerky movement that made me feel a tad queezy. I spent almost all my time remapping joystick functions and saying "WTF" to some of the default mappings. Locking on enemies for primary weapon take downs are a nightmare with your reticle bouncing around the lead indicator for your target and the whole thing becomes a minigame of "keep your eradic fire indicator in the enemy leady indicator box" while you're on speed and caffeine and your opponent is on vallium. It is a beautiful game however. But while the hud shows everything you need to know, the dash in your cockpit is wasted static space. $6 better spent on a beer. TO developer: Make this playable with a game pad. I hated it with joystick so I tried the game pad and it was even worse. But taking that approach may highlight whats up with targeting and leading your targets manually.

Without any sort of progression system to sink your teeth into, and not that much diversity of enemies in it, this game tries to stand on the strength of its core gameplay alone. Unfortunately, the controls aren't very good, so the core gameplay isn't very good. There's an attempt at having angular velocity on your rotation, but snaps to 0 whenever your cursor (or thumbstick) crosses to the other half of the screen, so instead of feeling like piloting an agile but heavy death machine it's just weird and clumsy. The boosting mechanic is also annoying, you get the most speed out of it by constantly tapping the button instead of holding it down. I do like how you get a low firing rate option for your gun, it does feel nice to pop a gun turret with a single well-placed shot.

The game is bit lackluster in content right now, but the feeling and atmosphere is there. The Devs can really build somthing great here with the systems already in place. I hope this game does well..

I've played a lot with it (~20 hours). I am into such games as my first experiences are from the 90s with X-wing vs Tie Fighter and Wing Commander. Pros: - Feeling (like Battlestar Galactica, or the new Star Wars) - Graphics - Voices (I feel I'm almost there) Cons: - 6 mission (hope in the full there will be more) - Controls (sometimes a bit hard with a mouse - I don't have a joystick) - Main menu (maybe because it's early access)

TL:DR it is a recommendation but be aware! Starway Fleet is a small space fighter game from a small studio. I had fun learning to dogde enemy fighters and turret fire. Also i liked the necessity for ship management. You have to react quick and strategic to do the missions with low losses. The game runs stable and had no mayor bugs or crashes during my about 10h playtime. But i wouldn't describe it as a finished release. It is just not polished enough. So if you want to support the dev team and are willing to play a not AAA game it is for you. Hopefully the devs can afford to expand it further. this is also feedback for the devs (Sept17) - it still feels a bit like early access. +Devs promised to patch and expand the content - 10 'campaign' missions only loosly sewn together; just intro text no cutscenes - priority mission targets are not highlighted - just anounced with voice - just some missions have a cascade of events - no statistics screen to rate your performance - difficulty setting seems just to adjust hitpoints of the enemies - once you learned where the shield generators on the (about 6) different capital ships are, they are pretty easy to outgun even with one fighter + Devs promised to patch and expand the content + 6 Degree of Freedom flight control + Shield/engine/weapon-management necessary + tutorial teaches the basics + nice graphics and backgrounds + totally different gameplay compared to House of the dying Sun or Everspace + i played with keyboard and mouse + 3pal coop possible (not tried)

I bought it for use with my XBOX 360 controller (and occasional Vive usage)...even after attempting to adjust the controls, the sensitivity was unadjustable and far too sensitive. I gave it about 10-15 minutes of testing, and realized that this wasn't going to work in its current state. Also, there needs to be a controller dead zone adjustment so you're not drifting from the slightest breeze on the controller. I'm very sad to have to say "no" to this since it's unplayable.

While I appreciate the attempt this game has made, it needs quite a bit of work to really shine in this genre. This includes an actual narrative -- rather than just some disconnected missions -- and above all else: targeting commands. In a game like this, situational awareness is KEY. I need to know what the biggest threat is at a moment's notice and focus on dealing with that threat. After spending time with this, I just feel like this game is, and I hate to say this: half-assed. It's as if the developers said, "Hey, space games are popular right now, let's make one!" and then didn't study the best games in the genre at all. I mean let's review: 1. No targeting commands for situational awareness. 2. No overarching narrative to keep players going. 3. No scoring or anything to keep players coming back. 4. Just about every mission is an escort mission, because us pilots LOVE those. 5. It could be fun, COULD BE, if it fixed a lot of these things. This game shouldn't have come out of early access. It needed more time in the oven, and it's a shame, because it COULD be great, which makes it all the more infuriating that it isn't. Here, check out my vids for my pudding of proof. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6K1_LepsaN-G9o_NccnuVWQjr4ueeDoq In short, if you have $10 and wanna buy a space combat game, get Freespace 2 if you don't have it already. Or buy it a second time. I just can't recommend this game at this time. Maybe if it continues to get love from its developers, then MAYBE it'll be successful, but right now it feels like a half-hearted attempt at the genre, and the genre deserves better.