Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Evochron Mercenary is an indie-produced open-world space-fighter sim. This the genre that Elite once pioneered and championed by such great games as Privateer but that big game studios have neglected. Like many others I have my eye on Chris Roberts’ Star Citizen, but I’d bought this some time back and thought that this would whet my appetite.

• This is a fairly hardcore game. The emphasis is on the flight sim part. You only get to pilot fairly small fighters and only one of these at a time, so it’s a lot less ambitious in that sense than the X series. Trading seems pretty desultory in this game since each port of call only has a very small selection of trade goods and there’s no good way to track prices across different ports. Noncombat activities include mining, cleaning solar arrays (really!) and racing but most players will probably spend their time fighting or exploring.

• The flight model uses Newtonian physics albeit in simplified form. FTL travel uses something called a fulcrum drive which uses no fuel, requiring only charging. But you need to set up a waypoint to warp to and running into things means instant death. You use old-fashioned rocket thrusters to maneuver around and those do eat up fuel. Due to Newtonian physics, coming to a full stop takes up as much fuel as you spent to get up to speed. A flight computer makes things a little easier on you so you can just set your desired speed and the computer will activate and deactivate thrusters to get you moving wherever your ship is pointed at the desired speed, but you can also set your fighter to inertial mode and manually control all of your thrusters. This turns out to be pretty critical to winning fights.

• Since you’re in a fighter, combat in this game is deadly. Typically a single missile hit combined with a few good blasts from an enemy is enough to kill you. Prepare to die a lot in this game. Effective combat is less like dogfighting and more like jousting. You have to pick at enemies at the edge of a group, accelerate to a high speed and then coast past on inertia to plink away at the enemy, and turn only when you’re a good distance away because changing direction means decelerating, and lack of speed kills. It’s novel for those who haven’t played this kind of thing before and mastering it is difficult enough that the truly skillful can pull off some amazing stunts, especially if you’re good enough at visualizing where everything is to manually use afterburners and individual thrusters to fine-tune your position and vector.
• For me, however, it’s not visceral enough to be much fun and it gets repetitive especially since the AI seems to always fly the same way. They always like to stay in a single large pack, never try to catch up with you provided you’re going faster than around 1,100 or so. It’s strange because they can easily push speeds of 2,500 or more when you need to move into position but they never accelerate that much to catch up with you. They also like to pepper you and only with missiles even when they’re being pounded by other enemies. I’ve found that my most effective role in combat is to draw their fire, concentrating only on shooting down their missiles. They leave my AI allies almost completely unmolested who then proceed to pound the shit out of them. I can win battles this way but I find it a boring way to play.
• One of the cool things in this game is that like the original Elite, you can seamlessly enter the atmosphere of planets and land on the surface. Planets even have weather, complete with storms and lightning. You can fight in atmosphere though your ship handles very poorly and burns frightful amounts of fuel. There are even all kinds of stuff hidden on planets and even on asteroids. Exploration is definitely a key feature of the game.

• While the flight controls are pretty good and graphics are decent, the rest of the interface is positively atrocious. The navigation controls are terrible and I understand that many fans have made mods in an effort to improve it. Suffice to say that manually finding a place by name using the in-game map is a task of monumental difficulty. Similarly, the other interface screens for handling inventory, buying goods at space stations and reading up on news seem very perfunctory, as if the developer didn’t have much interest in them.
• A major bullet point is that you can customize your ships, selecting different versions of key components and even changing their physical locations to change the look of the ship. Unfortunately I didn’t think the choices offered were very meaningful. You can either build a trading ship or a fighting ship. And there doesn’t seem to be more than one way to build a good fighting ship since everyone needs the same set of components and you always want the very best version of each part. Similarly the game lets you design your own weapons, but there doesn’t seem to be any point to building any weapon other than one with maximum damage and maximum range.

Overall it’s a solid effort for an indie developer and I can see how it can garner its share of fans. But I don’t think it’s quite ready yet for most mainstream gamers. The fun factor just isn’t there.