Boldly brave the bleak and bland.
It's too bad Space Force: Rogue Universe isn't a better game, since we don't see much of this genre anymore. If you're one of those gamers who salivates at the chance to explore tracts of polychromatic cosmos, you probably don't care about details - but it's in the details where this title falters. On the surface it seems promising. There are capital ships, a large variety of weapon types and vessel upgrades, a rudimentary crafting system, and a monstrous amount of side quests to acquire and complete. You earn money, hop across star systems, alter reputation with a number of factions, adjust shield power during battle, and hire wingmates to swing combat more assuredly to your side. Yet, despite all this, Space Force just isn't a satisfying experience.
Two modes are available, a free-roam mode and a story version. Starting off, you'd more than likely pick the story mode, since narrative is usually preferable to aimless offline gameplay. Unfortunately, the story elements here are so hackneyed, so derivative, that you'll never actually feel close to any of the characters, or really be driven to play just to discover how events turn out. You'll find the occasional double-cross, but in general the characters spout impressively dull lines in regards to their even more pedestrian motivations. This is no space drama, more like a series of loosely connected missions whose goals are all relatively the same. Hack this building, kill these attackers, blow up this station - it's a repetitive formula that wears thin for anyone who isn't obsessively bent on upgrading to the most powerful ship outfitted with the best weapons. Such a repetitive mission structure exists with the side quests as well. If Provox had cut down on the number available and concentrated on making them interesting rather than plentiful, it may have been more worthwhile to dump additional hours into this product.
Fighting gets most of the aspects right, but there were still a few issues that dragged down our enjoyment. You can emit EMP blasts to knock down missiles, give orders to wingmates to attack different foes, and input lots of turn and roll commands through the keyboard, or joystick if you have one. The game has a similar feel in terms of control to Freelancer, but the combat is far more difficult. Don't expect to knock out an enemy in under a minute unless you've upgraded your primary weapon, your weapon statistic, and hired a few wingmates. Enemy shields seem to regenerate faster than yours if you happen to lose sight of them for a few seconds. No joke, we had a fifteen-minute dogfight (space fight?) with one bogey, and man was it boring. Aside from the shields, the combat just lacks that frenetic drive; can't deliver what should be the intensity of deftly outmaneuvering an opponent and blowing him to smithereens. Enemies are quick, and it's exceedingly difficult to try and gain a tactical advantage on them, unless you happen to accidentally swing them into your sights as they're turning a corner. While fighting in groups, it also seems a little unfair that enemies mostly, with infrequent exceptions, will all target you.
That means you die, and do so with regularity. Space Force rubs iodine into the wound by penalizing you. So the last two hours you spent mining asteroids for metals and materials to craft ship upgrades could potentially go to waste, as you lose whatever you're carrying. This is made even more frustrating since the save system, if you can call it that, will continuously overwrite the same file when you dock with stations or gate to other sections. Just be sure to regularly fill the storage facilities located around space stations if you're not going to sell off your cargo, and on the way try to avoid bogeys floating amidst the fields and the random meteor showers.
Of course with the right upgrades, weapons, and wingmen, death becomes much easier to avoid. Amassing such might and regularly repairing your ship's durability requires large investments of capital; an unfortunate circumstance as money is a giant pain to acquire. It's a strange dynamic in Space Force: you need wingmates and ship upgrades to complete missions, yet to get ship upgrades and wingmates you need money, something accomplished by doing missions. What a wearisome paradox! Your bank account can be buffered by mining and selling off metals, or wandering around with the hope an enemy gates in close to a friendly base so as to acquire backup without shelling out the funds to make a hire, but who wants to do that?
But, and this is a substantial but, these are all issues that infect the process of starting out in the game. Once past the initial money and weapon power hurdles, things progress much more smoothly, mostly because you actually have a chance in battle. When you're not scrambling to meet unreasonable financial requirements, Space Force can be mildly entertaining, but more than likely you'll be thinking back to games past, asking yourself why can these kinds of open-ended space combat games never exceed what's been done before. Why does the genre still feel stagnant?
Something that could have smoothed out all the rough, prickly edges of Space Force is personality, something in excruciatingly short supply. Even with an insipid narrative, this game could have survived had its races had actual color and life, had its quest descriptions been more than brief, trite descriptions of an issue no player could possibly care about. Oh great, we get to jump two systems over to activate another satellite system. Why are we doing this, and for what? Why should we care about anything that happens in this game world? Oh, right, we're not supposed to ask those questions. As it stands, floating around and blasting ships feels like it has no purpose. There's no incentive for immersion here, just sections of attractive cosmic backdrops with flashy lighting. The experience is similar to flipping through a tabloid mag - it's superficially interesting, but there's no soul.
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