NOTE: This is an Early Access review, written on published date. Consider this a hands-on status update instead of a review.
Kinetic VoidNOTE: This is an Early Access review, written on published date. Consider this a hands-on status update instead of a review.
Kinetic Void was in my Steam library for over a year until I figured 'Hey, let's check back here'. A year ago, the game had little to nothing going for it apart from a great concept and interesting ideas surrounded by a host of potential issues with that concept. When I had first bought the game, it was nothing more than a badly coded 'Build your own spaceship' editor, with clunky menu structure and a complete lack of oversight on what you were doing. Many game features were only in the game through a nametag and had no body or actual mechanic to them yet.
So how does 'KV' do today? TL:DR version - it is a glorified shipyard. However, today, KV does do a host of things better than it did them a year ago. Performance wise, the game is no longer a memory and cpu knockout punch. Even larger ships and ships consisting of a high module count don't render the game unplayable like they used to do (consider 4.0 FPS on an overclocked i5 for a performance indication at the time) and at the same time, many aspects of the game look at lot better, including the shipyard.
Still, all of this is subject to change. What bothers me with KV, however, and has bothered me since shortly after purchase, is how the game is presented and how the current 'included feature list' and the actual game compare. Looking at that feature list you would almost think the game is already playable.
But outside of that really cool shipyard, there is a huge void awaiting you. A void that has literally nothing. No small debris, no nebulas, no asteroid fields. Just a planet in the distance, a massive station that you just got out of... and a bunch of moving dots on your hud. Gameplay wise, KV has a host of problems that I don't see any developer insight or solution on: the sense of movement in space is completely absent, ships are horrifyingly slow (even those built as fast ones) or the scaling makes them feel that way, and at the same time enemy ships are usually far too small for the players' vessel. Collision is clunky or non-existent, there are many invisible walls of death in the game (yes, in a space game, of all things) and if you fly a big ship, any smaller vessel will just crash against your hull, just like your ship goes 'splat' against any kind of larger ship, regardless of velocity or impact point.
These lacking mechanics make KV feel like a horribly clunky game, where still, a year after purchase, there is really nothing much other than a nice ship builder.… Expand
