Spaceforce Rogue Universe HD is exactly what you would expect from a HD resale of a 2007 space shooter – Something smack in the middle of Freelancer and Elite Dangerous. If you didn’t like this the first time round, don’t get it. If you loved it, get it.
HD remake in this sense is simply detailing the graphical resolutions available. The game can go up to 1980x1080p and with its age most computer systems will be able to hold their ground and run at full pelt.
So Spaceforce Rogue Universe has a story, however you can happily throw that out of the window. If you want to help avenge your dead father, you can go and choose story mode and go nuts. However if you think your family can avenge themselves fine you can choose free mode. The doors are thrown open for you: Pick a race, ship and class and go nuts doing over 2000 side quests, which isn’t bad at all.
The heart of Spaceforce is the ship and upgrading the ship goes in a cycle. Complete tasks to earn cash. This cash gets funnelled in to upgrading the ship, which is used to make more money which continues the cycle. The missions generally involve you in plenty of travel and fighting so the game keeps the pace well. The upgrade system is in depth and you can spend hours on even the basic ship fitting it out for yourself.
Travel in these games are important. The system is close to Elite Dangerous: you can use a mega speed mode when the camera is outside the ship, and a jump system lets you teleport around to space stations and dimensional gates. Skipping across systems are quite a breeze, which is a welcome break from games such as Freelancer where the system was somewhat slow and draining when having to get anywhere. Thankfully Rogue Universe has not only a large system but a high speed transport system.
So this games seems quite a nice, solid experience. Does this make you want to get a copy? Well picking it up for the first time gives you the only issue in the game: the learning curve.
The game has a minor tutorial, but the depth is so large that the tutorial covers very little of the grandeur available for you. When the tutorial is going it refers to buttons as its title, not as the assigned key. Finding a key for something such as activating the satellite in the tutorial mission required me to hunt the key down in the controls by pausing and heading to the options menu (its enter by default for anyone wondering.) I did print out a copy of the controls to stop this hunting, but the fact you must do this is a minor nuisance in an otherwise beautiful game.
This game, while I have sold it well, will not be for everyone. I personally am more of a Freelancer fan than an Elite Dangerous fan. That’s not to say Freelancer fans will like it, but the learning curve will be the clincher for people more than anything. Therefore this game gets a 3.5. If you have Elite Dangerous this is a solid sale for you. At the least it will tide you over for the next thousand years of waiting for Star Citizen.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
You must be logged in to post a comment.