The Evochron Universe is a seamless experience review

Evochron Legends (EL) is a space combat, mining and trading simulation set in the Evochron Universe. Since it is a simulation, it will take you time to come to terms with the mechanics of basic space flight, navigation, mining and trading - but the investment of effort early on will pay out later. The demo of the game is time limited, but the tutorials for the game don’t count against this. So it is encouraged that you play through the tutorials one by one, taking in the information presented. Although they can be daunting at first, with the ‘wall of text’ presented to you, that text is accompanied with spoken word, which helped me ease into the cockpit. I can see that without the tutorials, just diving in may leave you lost and abandoned. I can also see why people try to skip over the tutorials, their enthusiasm and impatience egging them on to get flying and fighting, but since the finesse of combat and all other matters are derived from your basic skills as a pilot in a void using Newtonian physics, I’ll stress it again, these tutorials and the information they impart is the key to opening the wonders of the Pandora’s box that is EL. Once you “get it”, you’ll uncover the depths that the game offers.

The Evochron Universe is a seamless experience, once you are in the cockpit, there are no zones or loading screens to bother you. You have a fulcrum warp drive which you can use to jump through space, and there are connected jump gates between systems, but it is equally possible to use your fulcrums to get to any system if you are a good navigator. Another plus is the ability to Planet fall and switch to normal flight avionics, and drop through the atmosphere and land on planet based stations. You can even land gently on the planets surface and go strip mining by focussing your mining laser downwards. The Universe is distributed about systems and they all have their points of interest and anomalies, as well as a main storied mission that you can choose to follow throughout the game. At space stations, you can enter the shipyards, or trade in precious goods, or re-fuel and re-arm, or take on local missions, such as cargo drop offs, ship protection, enemy ship destruction, races, solar panel cleaning, and asteroid clearance. You can even read the local news, and market changes, as well as get a feel for your standings with the various system wide factions, whether that be with the military, or the rebels. Your reputation amongst system factions influences equipment and costs, and how various other craft will react to you. To gain very good reputation with one faction, you may need to actively lower reputation with another by hunting and destroying their ships.

The game is an evolution of the StarWraith series of games, dating back many years, particularly Legends is a sequel to the Evochron Renegades (ER) game, with updated graphics, and many features requested by the previous games players.  In fact one of the key selling points of this game is that you’re not just buying into the dry downloaded software, you’re actually supporting the StarWraith community, you’re enabling the developer to continue evolution of the series. Uniquely, we have a dedicated person as the games sole developer, Vice, who takes a very active part in his community. He is willing to listen, to evaluate and to modify the game based on ideas and suggestions presented by his player base. A sort of symbiosis exists whereby the developer nurtures his players through his game, with hints, tips and advice, and they feedback, enthuse and cultivate his community and popularity by word of mouth.

The game is a simulation and as such, you are encouraged to master inertial flight, and the use of the IDS (Inertial Dampening System) which ultimately controls where you’re going and how fast, and how much fuel you will expend. Firing your afterburner with IDS off, and zero thrust, will hurtle your craft in a particular direction at maximum velocity, cutting the burners will maintain that velocity without expending any fuel. Meanwhile you can spin on your axis and take in the sights, or gun down incoming missiles, or perform those ‘flip on a sixpence’ Viper turns you see in the likes of Battlestar Galactica. Switching on the IDS, engages a whole array of thrusters and compensators to maintain your position and direction set by your steering and your main engines. Learning to take advantage of inertial flight and its manoeuvring possibilities, especially in combat, is the key to being a good pilot in EL. Combat can be very hectic and you’ll spend a while getting used to missile interception or avoidance (with countermeasures) as well as utilising beam weapons to drain your enemies shields, and particle cannons to blast holes in their hulls. I’ll warn you now, the game can be quite brutal and unforgiving in terms of there are so many ways to die, my advice would be quick save often and learn from your mistakes.

Graphically speaking Evochron Legends isn’t at the front of the pack, however, what it lacks in bloated textures, it makes up for in disk space conservation (the is a 45Mb download, with a 130Mb footprint) and artistic beauty. Some of the scenes available in the game are simply breathtaking.

In customising your spacecraft, EL surpasses most other space combat sims in the flexibility of your ships overall appearance, with many of the upgrade able parts (engines, wings, cargo holds, fuel tanks, shields) having distinctive looks, but also in that you can change the positioning of the parts, and their scale in all dimensions by using the custom slider bars. So you can build a truly unique vessel, symmetrical or not, with components you place and size up. Your craft’s hull for instance has a specific form, but what you do with the components attached to it, is completely up to you. All of this, and the spaceships look like space travelling craft, some space combat simulations struggle at delivering believable vessels, but EL manages to give you flexibility and integrity. The game’s visuals are also scalable so that you should be able to get the game running on quite a low specification machine and still enjoy it.

Both the multiplayer and the single player experience are interchangeable, meaning you can load a pilot profile and play offline, save it and then take the same pilot profile onto one of the player hosted dedicated servers. The servers can host 32 players online at any one time, and the software and configuration files are available for download, so you can run your own private Universe if you want to. Knowing that you can log onto a server, and continue your gameplay, only be able to chat to other pilots, or have them join you in some co-operative missions, or even go head to head against them in Player versus Player (PvP) combat, is extremely exciting. The StarWraith Community forum is a considerate, mature, friendly and very helpful place to converse about the game, and to organise meets and match ups online. So you’re never far away from someone who wants to impart knowledge about the game, or who is willing to give you a coaching session online. In fact there are a number of clans there that have grown together through the development of the StarWraith games and who like to take part in organised leagues. Theres even a Capture the Flag style setup in one of the systems for players to experience more than just your normal deathmatch style PvP game. The main difference between the multiplayer and single player game, is that the multiplayer game doesn’t affect your faction reputation.

As much as possible the developer has built the game to be mod-able. You can change a lot of the HUD and interface, textures and ship models, you can customise all manner of gamepad controllers and joysticks, and you can even set the game up for TrackIR’s 3d head control mechanism for managing you in cockpit viewpoint.The game has a few rough edges, it is a labour of love, and it has a number of idiosyncrasies (”close up” low textures, quirks in the interface etc), however, if you are willing to be a part of the StarWraith community, your suggestions can help forge the future for this game. Imagine being a part of the process of something so inspiring and so exciting… that is what EL opens up to you. For example, since launch last week, and ultimately down to many suggestions on the forums, the game has gone through 4 or 5 patch iterations, including function changes to the Nav console itself, and more multiplayer information linking and optimising. This is community based ‘hands on’ gaming at its best.

Overall, you just can’t find a more compact and elegantly evolved space combat simulation game. If Elite had a cool big brother this would be it.

Some points to note:

• affordable and very re-playable
• large explorable universe with factions
• freeform open gameplay, exploring, trading, building and customising, racing, fighting, mining, transporting, protecting
• the space flight physics (inertial flight actually helps you reduce the cost of fuel)
• planet fall, and switch to gravity based flight model
• the ability to customise your ship uniquely, by adding, placing and scaling parts
• the ability to play as a twitch pilot doing missions, and combat and mining (asteroid and planet surface) and trading, fuel scooping from stars and nebula
• the small download (45Mb) and install footprint (130Mb)
• single player profile can be used interchangeably on a multiplayer server and play co-operatively or competitively with up to 32 other players
• run a dedicated server of your own
• part of the StarWraith community