I had just warped into the alpha sector from my base and started moving to capture the nearest mining station. I was using my recently unlocked ship, the “Colossus”. Colossus is a close range fighter which moves slower than tortoise but packs punch when it does get into range. I reach my first mining station and start capturing it when I see that the third and final mining station getting captured by the enemy.
I dive the moment I capture my station in a bid to get a jump on my enemy. As I mentioned earlier, the Colossus is a slow ship, so by the time I reach the second mining station the enemy has already started capturing it. I start to come up to close the gap between my enemy and myself when I see that all 5 of my enemies had warped to the same sector instead of splitting up. I frantically type “help” in my chat hoping my teammates might come to the rescue long enough for me to warp out. In the meantime, I decide to try to use the asteroids as cover to stay alive as much as possible.
As, I near the first mining station, I see all four others of my teammates moving towards the second station to take out the enemy, which later resulted in a 5v5 duke out which was absolutely fantastic and fun. Though Fractured Space has MOBA-like elements, it feels much more as a third person action game set in space. The state of the game is good enough, that probably makes it one of the best free to play game on the market right now. But, let’s dive in a bit deeper into the game to see where this game does good and where does it fall short.
When it comes to gameplay, it has a solid record there. All of the ships seems pretty balanced and the devs are pretty quick with updates too. The meat of the game though is the 5v5 mode where two teams of five try to take out the enemy base by capturing it while making sure that their own base doesn’t get captured. The map is divided into five different parts. There is Base 1 and Base 2 for each of the teams serving as their initial spawn point.
There are two lanes called Alpha and Beta and a middle area called Gamma. A player from Base 1 can either warp to Alpha 1 or Beta 1 and then go on to Capture Alpha 2 or Beta 2 so that he can warp to the enemy base and try to capture them. And this works vice-versa. Alpha and Beta have 3 mining stations each which act as a source of experience that allows you to level up your ship to either increase damage or shields or its utility.
Like in an MOBA, all ships are of different classes, some are close range tanks, like my Colossus, some, on the other hand, have the role of more of a long range fighter and some rely on guerilla tactics of attacking and getting the hell out before the enemy can react. The game has a really well-built foundation. The only problem the game has in terms of gameplay is the upgrades to the ships themselves. They are not as useful to invest upon and honestly, the player would be better off using that investment on unlocking other ships. The game also features crew member cards with each card providing a certain bonus to your ship as a whole. The starting crew is not bad enough, and I usually end up using them only.
The graphics are pretty well polished and the ships look unique and very well detailed. The environment itself is beautiful to look at and through my entire playthrough, I have yet to encounter a visual glitch myself. The voice acting is pretty interesting but that’s all it has in the sound category as the music is pretty much non-existent.
Replayability is good, and the game has a drop system which provides a bonus on completion. The tutorial system is well fledged out too, for beginners.
Communication is a key to a lot of PvP games and this game is no exception. Right now, the main problem I found the game has is the low number of player count. This low player count ends up with you pairing with almost the same players if you play matches back to back.
