The 10 Things I am Looking Forward to Seeing In X4: Foundations

Ah, sandbox space games and me go all the way back to Frontier: Elite 2 so when I heard a new X game was dropping out of warp soon it was hard for me to not look forward to it. I have played a fair amount of the X series over the years from X2: The Threat to X3: Reunion and Terran Conflict so as I learned more about X4 I got more and more hyped for it. I won't be buying it on release as my PC is too rickety right now but it will be among the first purchases I make once I upgrade my PC.

So here are ten things I am looking forward to the most in X4: Foundations gleaned from the preview videos I have seen so far:

1. Fly Any Ship: This has always been a staple feature of the X games (save for Rebirth but we don't talk about that.) The ability to fly any ship from the smaller scout fighter to massive capital ships is always a win in my book.
2. Exploration: I love exploring in most games where it is possible but I love it in sandbox space games. From what I have been able to glean from the various videos and articles I have seen there are various wrecks and stations to find out there in the void which makes me wonder what other cool things exploration in X4 will have.
3. Dynamic Economy: Another staple feature of the X games and something I have always found pretty neat. Not just a feature for traders either as any smart pirates knows finding a good trade loot means lots of loot, yarrr!
4. Living Galaxy: The X games to me have always done a good job of creating the illusion of a living galaxy, the fact that things can happen with or without out. You can fly into a sector and find a battle going on or be stiffed out of your trade profits because that other trader landed first. This time around it seems they have really gone all out with it, factions can build stations, expand, go to war which is going to make every game very different.
5. Empire Building: Start off with one tiny ship and eventually have an entire fleet, stations and shipyards, almost makes this seem like it's going to be X4: The 4X. The new modular station building looks especially interesting.
6. Map Control of Your Ships and Stations: I think this is going to be a big improvement given from what I can tell you can control your fleets and such from the map screen like an RTS. Something I always struggled with in the previous games was managing a large empire.
7. Walking on Stations and Ships: Not exactly a feature I ever consider vital but I'll always appreciate that extra level of immersion. Being able to wander around ships and stations on top of flying around in space, I just hope it's not as clunky as it was in X: Rebirth.
8. Research: This one kind of caught my eye especially when you add in all the empire management aspects, though I do wonder just how in depth it will be or whether it will just be aimed at unlocking more exotic goodies, only time will tell. If it includes things like improving any ships you build, improving your crews and captains as well I think that could be very interesting.
9. More Accessible Mining: At least that is how it seems and sounds, in most space sandbox games if you give me a choice between mining or trading I'll usually take mining. In previous X games it always seemed like you needed a massive amount of set-up to even start doing it, however it now seems to be something you can do in any ship, slap a few mining lasers on a fighter or freighter and off you go which I much prefer.
10. New Universe (Kind Of): I am genuinely looking forward to seeing how the X universe has changed, different factions compared to before the story of the universe having moved on. 

Games I Love: Space Pirates and Zombies 2!

I was originally going to do this one first as I have put the most time into it since purchasing it last Christmas but figured I'd do them in order, because more content is good! This game was seemingly quite polarising so far as fans of the original went but personally I prefer this one to the first one for reasons of which I will go into more detail later on in this post. In short sandbox space games such as Elite and Freelancer are among my most loved type of sci-fi space game (alongside 4X strategy ones.)

This is the campaign galaxy map, there are others you can use if you go for sandbox mode!

This screen is where you will spend a lot of your time in Space Pirates and Zombies 2, the galaxy map. Here is where you will do everything from assembling your mother-ship, docking at star-bases, hunting down enemies or in a lot of cases at the start fleeing from them. The galaxy map itself actually really does bring across the more living and dynamic galaxy this game possesses, the AI captains can do almost anything that you can do, they roam the galaxy, trading, looting, fighting, upgrading their ships and cursing the void as they sail to the nearest station in an escape pod. It is not just window dressing either, you could literally sit in a corner and watch the galaxy changing around you.

The mother-ship this time around takes a more direct role in the action and is the ship you will likely spend most of your time piloting. Other ships are now called strike-craft and act as your support ships, featuring many of the hulls now rendered in full and colourful 3D, another departure that met with seemingly mixed reactions compared to the original. You issue context orders usually with the 'E' key to your strike-craft and can even fly them yourself if you choose, personally I love capital ships so I always take the helm of the mother-ship. You can fire and even aim all the weapons yourself which is useful for knocking damaged parts off enemy mother-ships or hitting various power-ups that can pop up. However my favourite mode as someone whom loves capital ships is the so called 'battle-wagon' mode, this lets the ships AI auto-target for you prioritising the ship you lock onto but enabling all your other weapons to fire at any other targets when they aren't in your targets firing arc.

It's hard to do the explosions justice in a screenshot!

The battles themselves are pretty spectacular to take part in which is one reason I enjoy the move to 3D over the 2D of the previous game even if it is just a cosmetic one. You fly your ship around on a 2D plane but everything is rendered in full 3D, the explosions in particular are pretty spectacular especially if you take out any of the larger mother-ships and bases later on. The modular nature of the mother-ships means that damaging one part of it more than another can actually break off that part, enemy getting away from you? Just hammer his engines til they fall off. That wing with the twin particle hoses tearing you a new one? Shoot it off! It is also part of what makes the explosions pretty satisfying to watch. Escape pods flying off as explosions ripple along the hull just before the entire ship blasts into three pieces, I may be a game-play over graphics person but I still appreciate a good explosion.

Things start off pretty small with you not having many parts but eventually you can build quite a monster!

The mother-ship is also central to the new ship design system, you construct it using a variety of different building blocks around it's central core. Sub-cores are the first of these they basically for the.. Well, core of your ship they determine the shape of your ship and what ports will be available for things such as wings, noses and engines. All of those have different affects, stat increases and possible weapons attached to them as well as coming in small, medium and large sizes (requiring 1, 2 or 3 relevant open ports in order to be attached to your ship.) You can make nice neat shapes, you can have a mother-ship wider or longer as you prefer. To begin with you generally just bolt on whatever you can salvage or scrounge up but later on you'll be able to buy and even have ship parts delivered to you via a catalogue system if you don't want to fly around to find things yourself. You can also choose the weapons of your strike-craft as well, as before your strike-craft are not just acquired from looting blueprints from wrecks but you also level them up by acquiring more of the blueprints of the same ships. You can even use the tractor beam in combat to re-attach parts of your ship that have fallen off, never really used it too often but it's a nice touch still!

As before you also level up but rather than it being a kind of research system you earn certain unlocks at every level such as more sub-cores for your mother-ship or access to another strike-craft hangar but also a randomly selected perk. These form your stat increases, more health, increased armour to stop ship parts breaking off, faster reloading etc. I will admit this is the one area I think I miss the original game on in making your own build with the research points as it were but it really is just a minor gripe for me.

The living galaxy it creates is fairly compelling.

Now I mentioned near the start there was a living dynamic galaxy so I'll go into more detail about that. Every single one of the 200 or so AI captains that roam the galaxy pretty much can do what you do (with the exception of starting a faction.) They loot resource stockpiles, sell their loot, upgrade their ships, befriend or destroy other captains not unlike you. The various factions expand, grow, wage wars all with or without your interaction. Especially at the start of the game you are a very small ship, bolting on junk-parts and just trying to gather enough resources to survive. Early on most aspiring captains will likely cut their teeth in the various arenas at each star-base to get some XP and resources which early on are hard to come by.

You can join one of the existing factions and help them in their fights and conquests or even make your own faction. It's a fairly simplistic empire building aspect to the game but I still appreciate it being there. You basically build your starbases, upgrade them, defend them and hire other captains to man them for a cut of their loot.

Resources still play a large part in the game, to begin with you'll be scrounging from various slowly regenerating resources piles scattered around the galaxy or later on extorting them from enemies or pillaging star-bases for them. Rez returns as the ever sought after resource that acts as fuel for your mother-ship to traverse the galaxy and feed your crew. The crew or goons maintain your ship, not enough and your mother-ships hull starts to deteriorate too many and your rez supplies will burn up fast. Then there is scrap, the post-apocalypse in space equivalent of money and the resource most people accept as trade. It may not be the deepest or most complex example of a living/dynamic galaxy but I found this aspect to be infinitely compelling.

The zombies of course also return to turn all that is living into twisted hunks of ship and flesh but I'll avoid too many spoilers about them. Suffice to say I found them no less challenging to fight than the first one.

In addition to the story campaign which sees the continuation of the story from the original, the return of some of it's characters and some hilarious voice acting you also have the sandbox mode. This has so many options for tweaking and changing the game and it's set-up. From faction sizes, zombie and bandit strength, several different galaxy maps if or when the zombies even appear and the like.

It is of course far from perfect as with everything:

• Lack of tooltips and mouse-overs: For the most part the UI is alright but when it comes to ship design and the shop interface some mouse-over tool-tips would be massively helpful in figuring out if part a is better than part b.
• Slow Start: At the start you won't find yourself engaging in many battles outside of the arena as even the junk flying bandits will stomp your feeble ship meaning it's a lot of scavenging and scrounging. It does add to the whole post galactic apocalypse feel but still it can be a little slow.
• Threat Level Early On: Whilst later on skill and a good mother-ship and strike-craft set-up you can defeat higher level threats or even multiple aggressors, early on though engaging higher threat level targets is usually just the end of you.

I admit to being biased with this game as I love free-roaming sandbox space games but the sheer amount of ways you can configure the sandbox and the story campaign as well it's hard not to recommend this. It's fun, colourful, compelling and I've gotten a ton of enjoyment out of it myself but then I am biased, I love me my space games! Now if you don't mind I better take the mother-ship out to go stomp a rather uppity fellow whom is trying to slap my star-base around.

Even fleshy zombie ships explode quite nicely!

Old Games I Still Love: Space Pirates and Zombies

This game holds a special place in my gaming heart for a few reasons, first off it was the very first game I bought into early access for back when Kick-starter and the like were just taking off. Secondly this took me back to older games in my child-hood, top-down space shooters with a sort of simplistic thrust-momentum physics engine. I was initially just going to look at the second game but if becoming a blogger isn't a good excuse for revisiting old games I loved, then nothing ever will be! Also it's the most Halloween themed game I could find in my collection that was also a space game so, win-win!

Whilst each element of the game is fairly simple the way they all combine together makes for some surprising depth you may not expect from the screenshots. At a glance it looks like a top-down space shooter, using a basic thrust and momentum system as I mentioned before but there is a lot more to it than first appears.

The battle portion of the game is as you would expect where you will be spending the majority of your play-time. You orient your ship, aim and fire your weapons with the mouse cursor and use the keyboard for thrusting, changing which ship you control. You then typically perform a variety of missions (escorting, blowing up toxic waste, destroying satellites, destroying enemies to name a few) or just generally roam around in the sectors looking for loot, resources and enemies to blow up. The variety of ships you can eventually get and fly along with the weapons and other items you can outfit yourself with really add a lot to this and it's helped by some impressive 2D artwork and special effects, the explosions and wrecks of ships I personally find particularly impressive.

A relatively small battle but it's zoomed out and these are some of the larger ships!

All that alone would be fairly impressive but then you add in the fact there is also some fleet management and ship design. You never fly alone, you can have various other ships and can give them various behaviours and stances or even order them directly from a pause screen tactical map. Destroying a ship you don't have will give you parts of it's blueprint eventually meaning you can build it for yourself. Weapon and item blueprints can also be purchased (or looted from the smoldering wrecks) of stations eventually giving you a vast arsenal to customise your fleet with. The ships themselves have various hard-points that you can customise the weapons of depending on the ship type and the weapons you have access to. The mothership only occasionally features in certain kinds of encounters and story missions but it acts as your base of sorts, if it gets destroyed, game over.

The ship design and hangar screen, whilst you can't design the hulls, weapons and other utilities you can!

You can further customise the way you prefer to play via the research system which is basically like an RPG leveling system of sorts. Data can be accumulated mostly via destroying enemies, as mission rewards and just found in crates, get enough and you level up giving you points to spend on improving various aspects of your rag-tag fleet. In general you can improve whatever you think you will get the most use out of, for example if you prefer cannons to beam weapons you can just improve them, shields, armour, hull, cloaking and more can all be boosted in effectiveness to make for some interesting ways to play if you ask me. Especially as you find more blueprints and ships to make use of them on.

The research screen is where you spend all your hard earned level ups!

Also there is a resource management aspect to the game some have already been mentioned, REZ is the primary resource it is mined from asteroids, given from mission rewards and even from destroyed ships. You use it to build new ships, buy blueprints and given how many ships you can often lose it is arguably the most important resource. Next up is the crew or 'goons' having crew aboard your ships makes them more effective, enabling them to fight off boarding parties, repair the ships hull and the like. They are also sometimes used to trade with at stations for usually to bribe your way through a warpgate rather than fight through it.

The galaxy is randomly generated at the start of the game and you have some options for customising it too!

And also we have the exploration side of things, you move around the galaxy completing missions for each sectors self contained civilian or military factions whom may also involved a third faction and later a fourth faction) the bounty hunters. Generally as you knock over the various warp-gates to unlock access to new sectors you complete missions, level up, get ship and item blueprints until you can progress to the higher level areas whilst also following the story.

The bounty hunters, added in a post release patch usually only attack you if you annoy one of the factions in the systems they 'protect' a lot. You can pay off any bounty you have accrued if you don't feel like messing with them but the ships they fly are among the best so, acquiring the blueprints can make the risk worthwhile. Just be careful if you do, they can jam your motherships warp drive and prevent you from escaping unless you pay or fight them off.

The system map, beware the ire of the bounty hunters they can ruin your day pretty fast!

There is a final aspect but it feels a bit like a spoiler so read this section at your own peril. The zombies have their own ecology which differs massively from how you play up to that point. They typically don't use shields for their ships and generally just have rapid hull regeneration, also they 'fire' zombie clusters at your ship whom then try to beat their way inside and board them. If your crew fails to fight them off and the ships health drops to zero rather than exploding the ship gets turned into a zombie version and then starts attacking meaning you can often find your own ships attacking you. The zombies can be truly terrifying as even the largest ships can succumb if enough zombies board it which can cause a spiral of destruction, needless to say they are definitely the main antagonists and a very interesting one at that.

This was my first early access purchase and it turned into an impressive game especially given it was made by only two people. Space combat and exploration games will always pique my interest and this is just one of the many games of it's type I love. Had it just been a simplistic top-down space shooter I may have just ignored it but all the various aspects make for something with far more depth than first appears.

Sandbox space games will always hold a special place in my heard regardless of how deep they are, ever since I first stumbled an old copy of Frontier: Elite 2 as a teen. It's no EVE Online in terms of depth but there's enough complexity and general fun in this that kept me occupied for quite a while. Whether it was hunting down that last ship blueprint to make my rag-tag fleet awesome or just respeccing for a completely different play-style. Even the defeats didn't make me put it down, hard battles that tore your ships apart and depleted my resources often had me pondering how to change my fleet and approach whilst mining more resources. I distinctly remember my typical shields up and guns blazing approach not working at a certain point and I reworked my entire fleet into a cloaking, bomb launching strike force. It took a while to get the hang of those slow moving explosives at first whilst micromanaging the targets of my others ships but when it worked, I was turning even the toughest enemy ships into so much space junk, floating off into the void.

It isn't without it's flaws however:

• Difficulty Spikes: Depending on the galaxy you generate you can have some brutal difficulty spikes in smaller galaxies or find yourself grinding through dozens of trivial warp-gates just to find one blueprint. Thankfully you can customise how big you want the galaxy to be, the prevalence of blueprints and the base difficulty.
• Can Get Grindy in Regard to Resources/Blueprints: Early on it's not so bad as the ships are small and cheap to build and you don't have a massive amount of space for reserves. Later on in the game larger ships and fancy guns can deplete your resources rapidly in heavy fighting sometimes meaning you have to fly off to a mining base and farm resources for a while. It becomes a lot more of a problem later in the game due to the zombies.
• Weapon and item stats given in bars not numbers: More of a UI gripe than a genuine flaw but no numbers are given in the UI it usually gives a comparative bar on the strengths of one weapon versus the one you are replacing it with. 

All in all this is an old favourite despite it's small flaws, it has enough aspects of sand-box space games to keep it interesting and a story to nudge things along. So if you are after some enjoyable shooting, looting and explosions you can't go far wrong with this little gem! Now if you'll excuse me, there are about a hundred zombies trying to board my ship...

Games I Love: Everspace

Personally I have always loved games set in space almost regardless of their genre (or genres these days!) Everything from space combat games like freespace, real time strategies like Homeworld and grand Strategies like Distant Worlds and Stellaris. So Everspace naturally had my attention helped in large part by the stunning screenshots I was seeing on the way up to it's release also helped by it's unique take on things. It's like Freespace meets FTL with a whole heaping of crafting, resource gathering and exploration thrown in for good measure with some random level generation and permadeath.

Visually stunning areas are the norm in Everspace!

A typical run of Everspace will see you selecting a ship from those you have unlocked so a fresh game would see you with only one (two with the DLC, I can't quite remember.) Spending any credits you earned from previous runs on permanent upgrades like increased loot drops or more weapon slots for particular ships. Then you select your difficulty and boom, you get thrown into one of the most stunning looking space games out there.

The combat and exploration part of the game is the main meat if you will, your goal is to reach the final sector much as in FTL. Within each area there are usually a multitude of things to do most key among them is making sure you have enough fuel to make the jump to the next area to continue your journey. Aside from that there is loot to be found from weapons to improved shields and many more I won't spoil as well as resources and blueprints (which are another permanent progression aspect for your runs.) There are wrecked freighters, bandit bases, hollowed out asteroids and more to poke around in for goodies however there is a catch beyond the outlaws and other enemies you will find. Linger too long in one sector and some mysterious aliens show up to put an end to you meaning you can't take too long in each sector lest you lose precious resources like missiles and the ever important repairing nanobots.

Which brings me onto the combat which just feels very satisfying to me helped in large part by some of the most epic and awesome explosions I have seen in a long time! Each weapon feels like it has it's place and uses, the humble pulse laser is very effective against shields whereas the satisfying gatling enjoys shredding some hulls. You can even apply three upgrades to each weapon should you have the materials and blueprints to do so. Whether you want to make that new beam laser you just found even more adept at stripping shields, fire a bit further or improve it's hull damage to make it more of an all rounder is entirely up to you. Whether it's dodging around an asteroid for cover whilst your shields recharge or finding out you can actually shoot down incoming missiles it's hard not to enjoy the combat in Everspace. Whilst you do have the option of flying in third or first person I personally prefer the extra situational awareness of third person.

See, I told you the explosions were epic!

I think I have only ever fully completed a single run of Everspace but I still have fun with it and often fire it up just to get some epic space action when I don't have time for something more in-depth. My personal favourite ship so far is the gunship simply due to how much firepower it has access to. Sure it loses the regenerating shields of the other ships but when you have that turret firing, a flak cannon thudding away and are spitting missiles out as if they are going out of fashion it makes me so gleeful. When you get that good run going it's just amazing but that brings me to the few flaws the game has, it's fantastic but not perfect.

Not only do you have pilot upgrades but upgrades per ship too!

The first flaw is the lack of an in system map, now I know you can occasionally find a comm array which flags everything in the area for you but still. It would be nice if things were at least tagged in lieu of a map so you could find them again once you have had them in sensor range once.

The second one is a minor issue to me, largely and it's to do with the initial difficulty. Before you have unlocked any of the permanent upgrades it can be hard to progress very far unless you opt as I eventually did to play on easy to get some of them.

Space can be a daunting place...

In light of that any new players who pick this up I have a few tips to potentially help it be less frustrating:

• Play on 'Easy' for your first few runs: Whilst you take a 25% penalty to found credits in general you will usually get further so you'll end up getting more to spend at the start of the next run. This way you will get more unlocks making the higher difficulties more manageable.
• Unlock Pilot Upgrades First: You will just have to trust me on this one, I know it's tempting to open more weapon slots or a new ship but the pilot upgrades apply to all ships. So increased credit loot bonus is best taken early along with improvements to nanobots. More credits means more unlocks, better nanobots means you will get further. 
• Don't hoard consumables and missiles: I know I used to do the same, not using things just in case I need them later. Best to just use them as and when you need them whilst you are learning the ins and outs of the game. 

I need bigger guns for this..

In conclusion Everspace to me is an awesome space combat game and some of the most stunning visuals I have seen, the explosions and nebula effects are especially good. It is one of my more recent favourites and I think I'll be getting many more hours of enjoyment out of it on top of the many I have already gotten from it!