Enjoyable, but heavily flawed – Escape Velocity Review

The actual gameplay of this game is fun. It’s a Galaga type shooter where you fly your spaceship and shoot other aircraft. It even looks good. The problem is with everything else about it. It’s hard to even figure out how to get from the starting hangar menu to the actual gameplay. Clicking the gameplay button takes you to a list of goals, but then there’s no obvious button to hit. The in-game tutorial doesn’t even cover enemies or whether the floating things that look like ship parts are good or bad (bad, apparently). The bosses come very quickly and seem designed to kill you as soon as possible, if only to inspire you to buy additional repair droids. The problem is that the first boss was about thirty seconds into the game, so I didn’t care if I lost my ship or not. As far as I could tell, the game is supposed to let you upgrade your ship as you proceed through the game and collect gems, but it’s painfully hard to figure out how to do any of that due to the poor game design and lack of anything resembling labels. So, to recap, the gameplay itself is enjoyable, but getting to that gameplay and staying in the gameplay is nearly impossible.
Review by Dan Awesome on Escape Velocity.