Reviews - Parrafin

When I was young one of my favourite game series was a top down open universe space sim called Escape Velocity. I love those games but always wished I could get out of my pilots chair and wander around the ship and stations. Now my childhood dream is finally a reality. Now the game is early access and there is a lot of stuff that's not finished yet and it can't compare to the hundreds of fleshed out systems and quests of EV yet but it goes beyond in more ways than just the walking around stuff. You can redesign the interior of any ship (provided you've unlocked the parts through research, you start out just being able to rearrange the internal corridors, reroute the power conduits add armour blocks and hook guns up to different gunnery stations or your navigation bride, but once you've unlocked them you can move, upgrade or add reactors, engines, thrusters, capacitors, heat sinks, weapon mounts etc to really change how your ships perform).
I haven't got very far with the campaign yet and I've been told that there is not that much of it as yet but what there is is pretty good, and the dialogue (mostly with a highly sarcastic AI) is well written.
The sandbox is great fun to play around in, blow up your enemies and collect a valuable fluid from their destroyed reactors , or shoot up their engines, board them, engage in a firefight through their ship and take it for your own, or maybe pummel the ship take out their life support systems and dock with the floating hulk (or if you haven't left any airlocks intact you could find an EVA suit and jet over and bord them through the big holes your guns have made in their hull) better get the ship repaired before your suits air supply runs out too though.
The game is intended to have AI crew mates but for now you can only recruit 1 and he will pretty much have to be told exactly what to do.
Its expensive for an early indie game which doesn't have a lot of its content yet but it's already a lot of fun (I'm enjoying it more than Elite Dangerous and it's a lot more finished than Star Citizen). As a fan of the genre it was worth it to me, I got 25% off in the steam sale and even Escape Velocity Nova still costs $30US for a 15 year old game. I found the game on spacesimcentral.com and was persuaded to buy it by watching Steejo's (slightly out of date) lets play series.