Review of NAEV
Hello and welcome back to the next review in our dynasty. Tonight, for about 6 hours, I have played NAEV and I have a full review coming.
In this simple game, based on Escape Velocity from the mid-90s, is a trading and combat sim. It is in the early stages supposedly, but I used the most up to date release - 0.42, and experienced no bugs nor any crashes or anything, so that's nice compared to a lot of free software.
You pilot your ship through various sectors in the universe and trade goods, do trade missions, and fight ships. Some sectors are different than others, belonging to other factions, not having planets, and so forth. However, multi=factions really aren;t supported well although they do get different ships and such.
There are a few quests you can pick up in bars, but not that many. The universe is smaller than you'd think, and after about 15-20 minute,s you've explored most of it. Then it's just trading and fighting inside of it.
The combat feels a lot like Grand Melee from Star Control, and the trading feels like TradeWars 2002. The result is a game that knows what it wants to do, and does just that, nothing else.
The fighting doesn;t have a lot of bells and whistles, the tradings has something like five trades goods (ore, food, luxuries, machinery and medicine). I fight it astounding that in today;s day an age, people still think it acceptable to set Sci-Fi trade goods by such generic names and categories.
There is no sound at all, despite sound options in the menu. Silly.
I have never played Escape Velocity, so I cannot tell you if it was amazing, awesome, adequate, or a big ol' miss, and I certainly can;t tell you how much NAEV may or may not have hit it.
I can tell you that I am done with the game. At this stage,m it's simply too simple. I got new weapons, equipment, ships, and such, but the game felt too simple. Now, add in real differences in the factions, more quests, and add things like space aliens, tech development, base building or something else to it to give it legs, and you might have the beginnings of something.
Current rating 1.5 stars outta 5, due to low graphics, lack of sound, simple mechanics, small universe, limited quest system, small number of trade goods in a TRADE and FIGHT sim, etc.