Surprised there hasn't been a topic on this.
Evochron Mercenery is the latest in a series of 3 games from Indie developer
Starwraith. it is literally a one man show, and quite frankly his achievement with this game s stunning . If there is a decent Space Sim to come out in the last 6 to 8 months, this is it.
The first impression is the game looks gorgeous and the music is truly wonderful.
It plays line a fully inertial version of Elite. You know the drill, you fight, you trade, you mine, you run missions and you explore. There is an official quest which shows you different parts of the game, but aside from there there is no story to speak of. Some of the Main quest rewards are leading you to crates that you can find advanced equipment, which frankly spoiled the experience a little for me as you can just keep selling the stuff for an unlimited amount of money. But you can ignore that if you want and you want miss much.l
Fighting is frankly hard to get into at first. I was lucky in that I've played the I War series of games so I have some idea how to fight in a relativistic environment, but I can see a newbie to this being completely lost the second hostiles show up. It does slowly get easier though. It does not go into IL2 Sturmovick levels of Simulation, but the Engines and Wings and whatever you add to the ship in the design screen does actually make a big difference to the way the ship flies once you are out in space. There is a computer assisted flying mode, but it makes you much easier to hit with missiles as you suddenly are emitting lots of heat from your thrusters.
Speaking of the design screen, You can actually stretch and shrink your ship components and move them around to your hearts content. its a really neat feature and yeah, had no in game effect, but it is fun to play around with it and get the ship looking the way you want. As for ship components, you have 2 parts, one being the number of assembly points your ship can use to mount drives and fuel and cargo bays, and the other is a number that denotes your Crew spaces, Equipment, Number of countermeasures and Number of missile hardpoints. The bigger the frame, the more you have. Crewmembers are people who give various benefits and get better as time goes on.
Flying through space is a wonderful experience. Close to planets and stations ships emerge from jumps all around you, and can actually join in to fights on either side depending on your reputation. There are warzones where you can fight powerful aliens with superior ships and gain access to powerful military fighters as opposed to the "civilian" frames. There are people who have been mapping the in game universe for 5 months and are still finding new planets and stuff to see.
AND you can actually land and fly around on planets. As you do you first see the atmosphere as an actual bubble around the planet, and you can look out the side window and see the atmosphere dissolve into the sky as you descend into it. And yes you can burn up in the atmosphere. There are cities on the ground you can dock at, trade and get missions.
Multiplayer is free and you can set up your own server for friends if you want.
See what I mean about gorgeous?Combat Tutorial. Skip to about 1:55 to see some action and him talking about the actual combat experience
Verdict; What other decent space sim has come out in the past year? Answer, none.
Buy it, for a whole host of reasons. The game is well polished, well balanced and actually fun (I've been having a blast with it), you are supporting probably one of the last of the old school bedroom solo developers, and the community in the game is friendly and helpful
You can get it directly from the company
here, or through impulse. Dunno about steam.
If you download the game you can play around for 2 hours as a demo, and then you can order a code from the guy who made it and it unlocks the full game from that.