In SpaceForce Rogue Universe you can start off by choosing to either follow the Story mode or Free mode. In Free mode you can choose any of the races and any of the classes and go and play as you wish, hence the name Free mode. Which I did; and before I knew it I had 15 hours into the game and was happily wandering about space mining asteroids for useful substances to create ship upgrades. Along the way I picked up a wingman who covers my back when we get into trouble as I'm a scientist and not so much into the fighting aspect, but as always violence is sometimes necessary in the game.

In the Story Mode you play as Jim Anderson a recent graduate of pilot training for the EMD - Earth Military Directorate - who sort of act like they own the galaxy. Well that's what happens when the peoples of Earth choose to have a military-based government. As Jim you can only pilot your EMD Interceptor, a small, fairly maneuverable ship that can, with upgrades, take on a variety of duties and be quite deadly. Eventually, with enough upgrades and money you can even take on a capital ship or a massive structure.

  It turns out that not all humans are happy with the military government and some have formed the UF, Union Force, who riot against the military alliance and moved themselves off to distance systems to separate themselves from the EMD. They basically want to restore a peaceful government to the Earth and the colonies. And this is how you get involved in the story because your sister has gone missing and you begin tracing the trail which leads you through a nice storyline.

   So if you're one of those people that needs purpose in your game, Story mode is for you. If you're more the explorer type and don't like to be forced to do the story quests then you can do Free mode. Of course as all games like this, Freelancer comes to mind quite often when talking about Space Force, you can take on side quests to supplement your income and gain some much needed ship upgrades, and I do mean MUCH NEEDED.

 
Graphics: 90%

 The people over at Provox Games are to be applauded, not only for the quality of the graphics in this game but the scalability of it. With a host of configuration options including whether or not to use V-Sync, pixel doubling, dynamic lighting, shadows and more you can tailor the quality of the visuals to your computer. As my poor AMD64 2.2GHz machine is slowly moving itself into the valley of the obsolete this is a fantastic feature. The minimum requirements for the game are 768MB RAM, 2GHz Pentium-4, DirectX 9 and roughly 3GB of storage space. With the minimum you would probably need to turn down all the sliders and features in the graphics. Personally I was able to maintain a good 25-30 frames per second and keep a few things running. But even then, the game still looks great.

  So why only 90% then? Well the game has a few minor flaws in it. Most notable is the fact that supposedly solid objects manage to intersect each other. This is something that always annoys me and can be seen in the asteroids (called meteors in the manual) which float and spin and wander aimlessly about the game. The problem is that in their wanderings they will manage to occupy the same space as another asteroid. If there is one thing that breaks the suspension of disbelief factor it's seeing two objects occupying the same space, or being able to shoot through an object that should be solid. Fortunately, the latter is non-existent in this game, only the prior is a problem. The other thing that made me take some points off the graphics was the lack of three-dimensionality at times mostly in the character portraits and some other minor details. But still visually, this game is out of this world as it should be.

 Provox even included some benchmarking so you can fiddle with your settings until you have a happy balance between beauty and performance. This is something that every developer should think about because with the rapid change of computing power these days it is sometimes difficult to even meet minimum requirements for some games and the ability to tweak things like that gives the gamer added incentive to purchase because they know they will be able to run it on their machine in a playable fashion.

 Another thing that some developers overlook is uniqueness. Uniqueness in weapons fire, explosions, planets, engine 'exhaust' etc. But not Provox. They have paid great attention to this and it results in an absorbing experience. Everything looks and feels unique and really makes the game enjoyable. While you cannot land on the planets and Earth is only a painting (BOO!) they are very well detailed and add a good backdrop to many of the space stations. I have probably only explored about 25-30% of the entire game space but I am certain there will be more visual surprises like the various anomalies which are a site to behold.

 
Sound: 92%

 Overall the sound is exactly what it should be, diverse, interesting and appropriate. However, among all these compliments there are still a few minor flaws, namely the voice-acting is flat and some of the lines delivered by the main character are almost laughable. But range of dialogue and variety are good. Some of the enemies will chatter over the communications channels while you fight and it gets redundant after a while but it is easy enough to ignore.

  While we all know there is no sound in space due to the lack of air, we also know that the game would be quite boring if there was no engine noise, weapons fire or explosions. The main priority in this department for developers should be ensure that the sounds are diverse, each type of weapon needs its own sound ,each size of engine should sound different, each type of explosion should be unique and in this game, all of that is true. And if all this aural awareness wasn't enough they have included WinAmp controls directly in the game so you can shut down the in-game music and control Winamp and your favorite music without having to window hop which is seriously processor intensive when this game is running. The controls are a simple play, pause, next, previous (all accessible from the console - activated by using the the tilde ~ key) but just load up Winamp and a playlist before you jump into the game and you're set to go.

 In regards to speech, again Provox has taken great care and each race has several different voices and a good range of chatter for them. I know it might sound minor but given the amount of it in the game it really needs to be diverse and they have made sure that it is. Well done!

Gameplay: 85%

 There is a lot of focus on flying around and completing quests. Unfortunately there is no NPC (non-player character or computer character) interaction aside from issuing orders to your wingman and the random chatter coming from the other ships in the area. It's a shame because this was a feature that worked very well in games such as Freelancer where you could interact with some NPCs and perhaps gain information or allies along the way.

  According to the manual there are nine different types of quests you can embark upon. A couple of them are simply going someplace and destroy someone/something. But there are some other ones that are slightly more interesting like activate satellites or hack into some structure or building. There is an escort duty type where you must ensure the safety of some other ships and another where you mus t find and cleanse a Collective infected planet. You can sort of think of the Collective like the Borg I suppose.

 Diplomacy: This is another area that could use some expansion. As it is, your relations with all factions and races are determined by three things; have you paid them a monetary tribute, did you shoot first (-5 points), did they shoot first (-2.5 points) did you do a quest for them (+5 points). That's it. I feel that if they could have added in some player-NPC they might have been able to really make this area shine.

 Trade is another area that is lacking. There's no haggling and no interaction. The prices are all set by the current conditions in the area and that's about it. Even Harvest Moon DS has a haggling system implemented in it. But no haggling is probably due in part to no PC-NPC interaction, there's simply no one to haggle WITH when buying and selling.

 The one thing that would have really been nice is a table of the effectiveness of all weapons against all types of shields and armor. You can read it in the game in the trade windows but it doesn't always help. Plus the shield types and armor types on each race and ship type would be massively useful information as well. I have died several times because I went up against a ship that had shield and armor that were nearly impervious to my attacks. When you die you pretty much lose everything in your cargo hold and it's bloody annoying. But it's the only drawback I could see from dying so overall it's not all that bad.

 
There is an experience level system but it doesn't really tell you what it's all about and it takes forever to get anywhere with it. Consider the fact that you get 1-5 points for minor things and only about 70-100 for major things it is a good deal of time and energy to even get to the 2nd level which is around 5000 points I think. It also seems like your wingmen manage to level up faster than you do because I have had wingmen go from level 1 to 3 before I was halfway through the first. There is nothing in the manual at all about it and it just feels like it was slapped in there for no real reason. But they are still publishing updates, the latest being 1.1.0.0 so maybe in a future update they will fix some of this.

 
Cut Scenes/Video: 80%

 Blah, the intro movie is just not interesting and almost unnecessary. The children running in the opening scene is horrible and they look as though they are floating and not really running at all. They also look to be made from plastic and do not move like real people. They sort of remind me of marionettes actually.

 The in-game cut scenes take place in the game interface for the most part and are well placed and done in a manner that does not detract from the game. If you are going to have a conversation with someone, an automatic one that you cannot influence, it happens right in the HUD. Basically before or after (sometimes both) there will be a small dialogue between Jim and whomever you are going to attack or be attacked by.

 They are overall very simple and quick and basically just there to push you through the story and supply with information about the next quest you must complete. If you play in Free mode these are pretty much completely gone.

Controls/Interface: 100%

  The ability to play the game in a window or full screen is a great feature because while I was traveling the 50,000 units from place to place I was able to set it to mega-speed (camera mode #3 allows the ship to travel 2x as fast as normal) and write this review. It means you're able to still keep an eye on things like instant messenger, email and the like while playing. With a game that could possibly consume 100 hours of your time it's nice to not be completely cut off from the outside world. Just be careful to spin the mouse wheel in the right direction or you might hit retro-thrusters and go backwards for a few minutes like I just did. When you are typing at times you will find that the game reacts to it so you need to keep an eye on the HUD when you are outside the game doing something. I have just had the inventory open, the engines stop (2x) and the camera change modes. Of course you can always pause the game and do something outside it as well. But I like the feeling that I'm sitting at the controls of my ship as I have it on course for a station and I am doing what I would be doing while waiting for arrival, checking out the window for asteroids and enemies and writing in a journal or something.

 Of course it's not all waiting, there is local jump and hyperspace gate jumping in the game as well. So you can quickly speed across a sector to a pre-determined point or you can swiftly move from solar system to solar system.

  When you're not taking care of other things while traveling from point to point you need to be aware of your controls. The controls are highly configurable, something every game should have but surprisingly gets left out of many. This is very important when you have 30 buttons to remember. Having a reference helps and all the default button mappings are in the manual so I ended up just using them instead of having to label all my keys with stickies. If I actually had a spaceship I imagine many of the buttons would be the light up worded type so I didn't accidentally launch a missile when I wanted to open a communications channel...not that I'm saying I did that in the game. I mean that's a keyboard button and a mouse button there's no way I could mix those up right? Well you'd be surprised.

 The game supports keyboard, mouse and joystick.

Summary: 90% - BUY IT!

 Overall this is a very enjoyable game both in Story and Free modes. I spent many hours flying around trying to be pacifist and when that failed I hired a wingman and we took out whoever thought they had found easy pickings. Scientists can be deadly too you know. Look at Victor von Doom for example. Once I had managed a mass driver cannon and some anti-matter torpedoes I quickly managed to eradicate many who would prey on my poor science vessel. Of course as I mentioned in an earlier section weapons are of variable success against different types of armor and shields so there is some strategy involved in not getting vaporized.

 Buy this game if your computer can handle it. Heck buy this game if your computer MIGHT handle it, with all the configuration options you should be able to get it to run quite nicely. You will spend far more than an hour per Dollar/Euro/Pound and you will find yourself returning to it time and time again. This is a big win for Provox games and JoWood and I hope they continue this franchise with an expansion or another game in the series because I will always look forward to it. This is a game that I will continue to play off and on for years to come and I think many of you who are science-fiction and space fighting fans will also enjoy this game. It is available everywhere for the PC.

Whew! I know that was/is a lot to read but it's a big game and there was a lot to cover. If you've just skipped down to the end to see what I really thought, well I really think it's great and even though my laptop threatens to melt down while playing it, I continue to do so. 

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