Flatspace IIk

Don't let the low play time fool you, I've been a player of Flatspace for a long time, the original, II and IIk. Don't let it's top-down gameplay fool you, this is easily one of the most immersive space sims I've ever played. The weapons, ships and upgrades are all beautifully balanced; the AI is tough, but fair; the combat is tight and responsive; and the controls are easy to get your head around. The game is set to a fantastic, etherial soundtrack by the developer that beautifully fits the universe. Choose from a plethora of roles, ships, hardware, factions, allegiances and more! Will you be an asteroid miner, scouring asteroid fields and nebulae for precious resources? A daring trader, shifting huge cargos from half way across the galaxy and fending off pirate attacks? A loyal officer of the law, responding to destress calls and upholding the sparse laws of this harsh galaxy? A bounty hunter, hunting down the alien menace and the galaxies most wanted for cold, hard cash? And so mu...

Probably the worst experience I've had with a game on Steam in over ten years. The darn thing TAKES FOREVER to start, and when it does it crashes as soon as one tries to adjust ANYTHING in the graphics settings! I'm sorry, at 53, I don't have time to wait for your game to boot up after nearly 5 minutes to then have it crash and have to cold-reboot. And YES I adjusted the resolution in the cfg file and followed EVERY troubleshooting suggestion in the readme. You guys need to fix your game and bring it up to 2018 speed. For now... REFUND. Good luck!

Very glad to have this game again, been a long term fan of this series, and now it's on steam.

Game unplayable. The control scheme is very awkward. Mouse sensitivity goes from slow to at 1 to all over at 2. Ship controls are based on moving the mouse right and left to move a ship-orbiting reticle that the ship points at. It would be much better if it followed the cursor, or just turned the mouse control of the ship off. Avoid at all costs unless you like pain.

I think this could be a fun game and it ticks off many checkboxes that I would look for in a game like this but the control style is very counter-intuitive. When your ship is pointing towards the top of the screen the controls act normally, left it left and right is right, but when you're facing towards the bottom of the screen those are reversed and moving the mouse left turns your ship right and vice versa. I tried to mentally adjust for this but after a while I just started to try and keep my target in the top half. It made dog-fighting nigh impossible. If there was a way to toggle control schemes that would be wonderful but I couldn't find any setting like that. The UI does also have a somewhat clunky feel at times. For example using F1 to bring up the help menu doesn't bring up a menu so much as an overlay that can then be overlaid itself by other menus. Keeping track of what windows respond to what commands (for exapmle the map only responds to the space bar and not escape) is ch...

Loved this game back in the day. Saw the reviews and was thinking I never had loading issues on my old machines, I can say don't know if they fixed others issues or just my 3 year old computer runs well, but it loads quick and I have had NO issues. I enjoy the regular game as I like getting to the powerful ships. I never get to far on ironman, got up to a destroyer once. Also the replayability of trying different professions is cool.

i used to play this game ten years ago and its first title even before on my windows xp crt monitor pc. This is my third copy of this game ( first on steam, others gone with the computers they were on ) I bought the game to support the devs and to leave a review in hope of a new title or even a remake. As for a review, i know some of you will enjoy it to the full and some of you will find it old.Music is beautiful, gameplay mechanics are awesome, controls might feel clunky at first but you will get used to it. Graphics and UI will show its age. But i can assure you this is one of the games i never forgot, it was one of the hidden gems of its era and from time to time i came back to it for a new Pirate playthrough. If you decide to give it a chance i hope you will enjoy it as much as i did.

I wanted to like this, and bought it wanting to like it; but I found it quite literally unplayable. I found it impossible to get the screen resolution change to happen (despite many restarts). I found the controls irritating (in 640x480....). I found the initial experience so offputting that I did something I've never done with a Steam game before: I got a refund. If this works for you on your system, I hope you get to enjoy it, because everything looked interesting and fun to me; but I absolutely lost patience with its technical flaws, and controls, and I had enough.

Even though I currently don't have a lot of time clocked on the Steam version of this game, which I bought only recently, trust me when I say I probably played this game for 200+ hours in total. I think it can get really addictive when you get into it, and there is plenty to do. The soundtrack and sound effects in general are fantastic and unique, and probably nostalgic after all this time. Maybe the game isn't graphically the most appealing to people, but it has its' own style, and I respect that. There is no doubt in my mind that whoever likes space games in general will sink hours into this one. However, this is as much a review as it is a suggestion for the developer. There are a couple of features that would without a doubt improve the QoL, and that I don't expect would take that much time to implement. The first one that might be a bit controversial is increasing the game speed in general. My last playthrough I played the entire game on what I think is 2x game speed (config fil...

Fun 2D Elite style game that holds up wonderfully in 2023. You can get lost in Flatspace, so many options and things to do. It looks and plays great - earlier bugs with startup time have been corrected for years. Shooting enemies that deserve it is so satisfying. You will definitely reach a point where you are outclassed and outgunned and surprised, but Flatspace II was giving us that sort of gameplay option decades before it was the thing to do. Played it before it was here -- really like this game and glad it's here on Steam!