Lane-swapping, death-balling, trying to teleport home or warp to the location of beleaguered allies…it's all right there in Fractured Space, but shot through the lens of starship combat. Yet the dynamics are fundamentally the same.
The fact that each part of the map is physically separated from the others makes matches feel like they are unfolding in a series of massive battles over different objectives. There are lanes that you and your team of capital ship captains can push in order to open up the enemy base to attack, but there are no little nuisance creeps on the map to make your powerful starship feel like its job is pest control. There are also some placeholder menus for crucial things, like changing your ship selection before a match begins, which obscure some pretty important choices and information when you need them the most.įractured Space manages the unusual trick of borrowing a lot of MOBA elements without seeming much like a MOBA. Give an order to jump to a new sector and, fifteen seconds later when I was just about to force-close the game, my ship would suddenly start the jump animation. The moment I started taking matches from the US servers, however, I started encountering games where lag rendered it almost unplayable. While performance on the London servers was never stellar, it was steady and playable. Ironically, Fractured Space performed best when I was accidentally set to search for matches in the UK by default, rather than my home region of the eastern US. For one thing, it's a complete roll of the dice whether I will get a decent server from match to match. While most of the Fractured Space looks and plays like a finished game, the areas that are still works in progress are extremely rough and extremely jarring.
It's like one of those breathtaking fanfictions where someone tried to use science to explain exactly what would happen if Star Wars, Star Trek, and Babylon 5 militaries all encountered each other at once. Once you've made your choice, you take to space from a third-person perspective on your spaceship, as part of a five-player team, and are greeted with all the sights and sounds of sci-fi space battles.
Others are more Battlestar Galactica, all slabs of armor and heavy weapons. Some of the ships are pure 1970s, Apollo-influenced astro-battleships. When The Expanse came out this year, I wasn't sold on the show until the episode where a Martian flagship perished in a pitched naval battle.įractured Space and developer Edge Case Games get where I'm coming from.įrom the moment you log in, you're greeted with an alluring menu of starships and manufacturers, each with their own art style and role in battle.
I've watched the episode where Battlestar Galactica assaults New Caprica more often than I've watched any other part of the third season. I've watched Master and Commander a dozen times or so, but sometimes I put the disc in the drive just to watch the part where Aubrey gives the order to run out the guns and let fly on the French raider. Each Monday, Rob Zacny picks through the detritus of early access to separate the games might one day be assembled into something worthwhile from those which should remain on the scrapheap.Ĭapital ship warfare is my favorite kind of pornography.