They can scan planets for lifeforms, atmosphere and such, and scan ships to get a full readout of their internal components like shields/weapons/etc.īut yeah, damn, there’s nothing like warping into a system to find out you’re *inside* a giant, crystal-laden rock and have to fly your way out. Plus emergency shield boosting powers, and the ability to toggle between Modulated (-X% energy weapon damage, -X% emissions/detectability) and Static (-X% physical weapon damage, +X% emissions/detectability) shields that can really make the difference in a fight. Can try to hack into enemy ships remotely and disable their thrusters for ~30 seconds – think the Science powers from STO but without an instant success – it takes upwards of a minute or so to get in on a bad fight. Science has got like… viruses and booster programs. intact!), go sell it and upgrade your own. You blow ships up, fly in to collect the scrap (and sometimes get bits of their ship like their shield generator/core/etc. It’s not on sale sadly because it’s still Early Access and there’s bugs here and there, but it was fun enough for us to keep plowing through regardless. We literally did a run where me (pilot) and the main gunner stayed behind for a boss fight – the other 3 did a boarding party run on the enemy, ran into their engineering bay, dropped their shields and killed their crew (everyone respawns on a ~15-30 second timer, including AI), but it gave us just enough time to blast through their newly exposed hull. XD Plus you can teleport over to the computer-controlled ship to board them, get into a firefight with the AI crew and then someone slip off and go pull their power lever. It’s silly but try doing that while getting shot at and 4 other people are screaming in the voice chat. Pull lever, go to computer, ‘Boot Ship OS’, wait, pull next lever, ‘Prime Warp Core’, wait, pull last lever. I haven’t seen it happen, but we practiced the process – if you get hit with an EMP weapon that knocks out main power, someone has to go reboot the system. There’s also nice big wall-mounted levers for disabling your shields (ostensibly for when you’re in a repair dock and it’s required for them to work), ejecting a critical core, all that fun stuff. Engineering may have to run to the back of the ship in emergencies. ![]() ![]() There’s Bridge stations for everyone that let you do 90% of what you need to, but Weapons has his own bay for hopping into turrets (that anyone can use) or the Main Gun (that only he or someone who puts a talent into it can use and holy balls they’re usually amazing, complete with ridiculous knockback when firing). I think uh… Guns of Icarus Online is like that, too. The whole FTL-style ‘target their engines!’ from your foe will literally set your Engineering bay on fire. Plus at any time, if you take a good solid hit to the hull, shit starts exploding and whole systems catch on fire, meaning you have to run from your station, pull out your fire extinguisher, put out the fire first and then repair whatever blew up. ‘does the pilot *really* need that much thruster power? Can I pull back from weapons or shields or overall core output to stop this thing from melting down?’ Then it’s a balancing game of ‘do I use this extra coolant tank we have and turn on the pumps, draining a finite resource we have to resupply at stations?’ vs. Everyone’s demanding more power, and you can give it to them, at a cost of raising the core temperature. That whole ExoSuit mechanic is again, implemented a little clumsily (you have to run to Life Support to pick one up, which can be on the other end of your ship from the teleporter pad… but it makes sense if your ship’s life support itself has been shot out and you’re asphyxiating)… but the fact that you really need someone on the Science console to initiate a scan of the planet and then read the report to figure out whether it’s safe to breathe or not is <3Įngineering is, of course, a hotbed in firefights. Some systems have planets in them you can scan and beam down to for away team missions (though the FPS combat feels both just as clunky and somehow less clunky as STO’s no special abilities, just point and shoot, but you have the option of going down as-is but with a jetpack, or when the situation warrants, climbing into an ExoSuit that protects you from harsh elements). ![]() It’s very STO-like, but the better parts? You still have quests to pick up and turn in that amount to basically ‘go here, kill the guys, take the loot and return the special item(s), you keep the rest’. Had tweaked my HOTAS setup, so jumped in as Pilot. Then saw someone start up a game with only 1/5. I did a lot of Engineering and Sciencing at first, jumping into fill whatever the last open role was in most people’s games. The following is a lightly edited chat dump of my thoughts on ~7 hours of playing Pulsar: Lost Colony the night before:
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |