In addition to some suggestions I have for the player experience, we encountered the following issues:
-Experienced an issue where the AA gunner attempted to interact with the loot box machine, after which his mouse look was disabled and his avatar became frozen on our screens. He attempted to leave and re enter, but the frozen avatar remained and even though he could move around on his screen, we could not see him.
-Similarly, after dying while trying to work out controls and things with just one player, I became stuck in mouse controls and could not interact with the menu, forcing me to ctrl-alt-delete my way out.
-During all runs, experienced an issue where pick up items were not synced across player screens. This presented issues in coordinating with bow gunner whom was in charge of the tractor beam as well.
-Periodically, the entire ships and all characters would begin rapidly teleportation back and forth between their current position and one about a feet away from where they were. This seemed to affect graphics only, and did not cause other issues.
-I don't know enough about game design to phrase this any better, but there was a weirdly high GPU load reported by the entire squad compared to how graphically intensive the game appears. My machine is older, so slow down or having to decrease resolution is not uncommon for me, but the bow gunner just purchased a new computer last year and was also forced to down rez their screen manually to get the game running smoothly.
-Building on the last issue, in the option menus, the screen rez options did not work for me. I could change them, but they did not affect the game or change anything. We had to do it in pc display settings
My personal suggestions regarding helmsmen and engineering duty:
-Please add a directional accelerometer and speedometer to the helm station UI, and perhaps an option to have the steering wheel have more feed back when not pushing the turn button. Being able to see only inside the cockpit, it was somewhat disorienting to pilot the railgunner with the slight lag between making adjustments on the controls and then waiting for the actual ship to respond.
-Suggest replacing some missile firing hard points on enemies with AOE effects similar to the nuke, possibly smaller, like mortars. The primary concern of the helm during our play throughs was simply to point the bow gunner in the correct direction, and making more damage dodgeable would probably fill out the role somewhat.
-Suggest adding an interface to open loot boxes either in the crew quarters or next to the upgrade console on the bridge. Duties had to be split up between crew, and having the boxes down with the bow gunner was inconvenient because we were unable to adequately communicate back and forth on how to use the device due to everyone being new, and already the bow gunner had been assigned the tractor beam as well. Both loot boxes and upgrades are essentially part of the same system, and trying to haggle with another player down stairs would have been a bit silly, so I had to stop and go down to the cargo hold every time something needed done.
-Please add an explanation of what each part of the UI in the top left of the screen means.
Feedback regarding the gunner's stations:
For this next section, the feedback regards a three man crew which had chose to assign helm, upgrades, and loot to one player, replace both guns on the upper deck with AA guns and assign them as well as the shield projector to another, and with the bow gunner operating the Ion cannon, tractor beam, and railgun on the lower deck. We found this to be most convenient...
-Suggest that the railgun fold flat or lower on to the deck, possibly under it. I think the bower gunner complained at one point that it obstructed the view on one side. I did not wish to move it back upstairs as that would have left a blind spot in the air defenses.
-Speaking of the railgun, I'm not sure if this is balance issue that implies it needs buffed, or that the other charge up gun need nerfed, but we pretty much never used it after we upgraded everything. It may need a rework, or perhaps some alternative “super weapon”, such as the nuke as another option for craft with already adequate anti-shipping weapons. Aoe of some kind would be welcome.
-Regarding this last thing, some more weapon choices would be nice, perhaps missiles or a mortar/hedgehog/etc or a mine layer would work.
-Similarly, adjusting enemy design to make weapon choice more important or to further correspond to specific enemy weakness than it already does might make ship design and upgrade choice feel more dynamic.
-Suggest reworking the shield projector to be more dynamic. We mainly just had the AA operator put it up for the boss encounters, and it would last for the entire time it took the bow gunner to pulverize the boss. Maybe have it have less health but charge up other weapons when it absorbs damage, or if it already has some secondary effect we didn't notice, make the effect more obvious.
I leave this as an after thought as I imagine the full game will have more options for difficulty. I know I had previously said the game should be easy enough for three drunk people that play it once a month and still have a good time, but upon playing, perhaps just a bit more difficulty might be welcome.
All this said, after restarting the game three times and lowering our screen rez to get it working, the bow gunner and AA operator both reported that they had a great time and loved the concept of the game. Working together cooperatively like this was great for group comradery, and we all seem to agree that ship design and piloting are an engaging and entertaining game play elements.