Lightspeed Frontier, another ship-building sandbox experience, impressive

I'm an absolute sucker when it comes to spaceship building and combat games. Avorion is a good one I put some thoughts up on, but Lightspeed Frontier [Steam, Official Site] is also quite impressive.

Not a bad trailer, pretty cool actually.

Note: Key provided by the developer.

Lightspeed Frontier has two modes, a campaign mode with objectives and a sandbox/creative mode where you can do whatever you please. For my tests I decided to check out the campaign mode and so far I've actually been really impressed.

I have to say, while the graphics aren't as good as Avorion, the gameplay is actually pretty decent.

The ship building is a little like Captain Forever Remix, with you destroying enemy ships and then salvaging any blocks you managed to not obliterate. You also come across space stations, where you can buy and sell various blocks and items. There's a good variety in the weapons too, like a phaser, a laser that shoots in blots, flak cannons and so on.

It's a game where you can end up spending hours customizing your ship, so thankfully ship designs can be saved at space stations so you don't lose everything if you die.

Take a look at my ship, I call it the "Scrapheap"


One thing that really surprised me is the warp drive, it puts you in a bubble and when you get going it's actually really very clever. It sounds good and looks good and gives you a decent amount of control with the warp speed too. That hasn't stopped me coming out of warp and smacking straight into a space station though.

The controls are simple, with mouse for position and weapons, along with WASD/QE for movement and rolling. It works pretty well, with a few ways to adjust where the ship is pointing. What I don't like, is that the movement controls still control the ship in the build mode, which makes rotating the camera only done with the mouse and it's difficult to get the camera in a position you want. Ideally, they need to allow WASD to move the camera and disable ship movement when in build mode.

Sound wise, it reminds me of the original Star Trek series, the laser effects really do sound like they would fit right at home there.

As expected with Early Access, it's a little buggy. Pressing F12 to take a screen shot completely crashed it, for example. That seemed to only happen once, as loading it up again and taking shots seemed to work fine, so it might not even be related.

I also lost a quest due to the crash bug, as I went back to the station that gave me it and re-did what the tutorial told me and the quest was just gone.

Great idea, execution isn't bad, but it needs some polishing. Even with the issues, it still has the makings to be a great game. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.