So, I finally played Underspace and yeah, it feels like Freelancer. Slightly jankier, slightly uglier and clearly more fleshed out in the RPG dimension but definitely Freelancer. Actually feels pretty nice to be able to jump into this and already knowing like 95% of the controls.
I did pretty much everything I could find in the demo without going for piracy. Did the first quest, visited Karbelle, cleaned the battleship, rescued Pyrona, maybe some other stuff.
First things first, shield rendering is still broken by default on Linux. Just one opaque sphere. force-opengl fixes this though.
Some notes in no particular order:
I found the lead pip pretty inaccurate. I was regularly aiming far in front of it to hit the enemy and at that point it just becomes a distration. Whether or not it's accurate I'd like to see an option to turn it off altogether. I just prefer estimating lead myself. A lag pip would also be a neat addition.
Some sound effects are really grating. The thruster and the sound when you try to shoot while the cruise engines, sorry high engines are active come to mind. Also the engine sound has this really noticeable loop that becomes annoying quickly.
The animations and sounds when a tradelane, sorry laneline is disrupted are strangely smooth. I didn't even realize it was disrupted until my ship had slowed down many times. Could use more "impact".
The music is also a bit weird but that's just preference I suppose. It does become repetitive and the looping and switching between tracks when going in and out of combat isn't always smooth.
I really hate how using reverse thrust reactivates the engines while in suspended physics.
The UI frame around non-selected ships is distracting, especially in large battles. I'd tone it down.
Not a fan of the fullscreen UI of things like the map, character sheet and inventory. In Freelancer you always had at least some idea of what was going on as you still has all your other UI and screen edges visible. This is a straight downgrade.
Why the fuck would you retain F1 as the menu key? Just put it on Escape like any other game. I get that escape is the cancel maneuver key in Freelancer but you can just put that anywhere else such as backspace. That's one thing I certainly don't miss from that game.
Is the volumetric lighting option some kinda joke? At least in Vauldric it just seems to remove contrast and make everything look extremely washed out.
I found visibility within nebulas pretty weird, you can see the lights from ships going through tradelanes, sorry lanelines from within them and the ancient gate is also visible from pretty much anywhere. Did you do that one for people to more easily discover it in the demo? Seems weird especially since Pyrona mentions it being hard to find.
The skybox in the system past that gate is pretty fucking neat.
Your ship seems to have a bit of sideways momentum right when arriving in the next system after a jump.
I don't much see the point in the first person walking around on stations, I get that it's optional and you can just use the buttons at the top but it just seems superfluous.
Related to that, the dialog UI in first person is trash. Make it so it can show more than three lines of dialog and three options. Ideally there should be no scrollbars necessary.
The autopilot seems kinda unrefined. It often overshot a bit or did large loops to avoid collision. It does generally find it's target though.
Collision avoidance when cruising is pretty weak. If there was an asteroid or debris in my path I almost always hit it.
Not a fan of how there's different ships that look exactly the same. Just small differences could go a long way. An additional fin here, a missing engine there, etc.