Review time, EVE Online

I know I said I would play a full 14 day trial of EVE before writing my review, but after 4 days I think I can honestly say I’m done with it.

I’ll break my review down into a seven sections,(gameplay, graphics, story, community, economy, addictiveness, learning curve/controls, and final opinion) each with its own rating and justification.

This was like no other game I’ve ever played. Having to travel from place to place in real time gave a real sense of size to a universe scaled play area. But the lack of a player controlled flight option was a strong negative for me. All travel was accomplished by selecting a destination and hitting the autopilot button. While this gave me plenty of time to play Dragon Age while traveling back and forth from station to station and mining sites.

Mining, that word is becoming annoying. It is the only real activity people do in this game. yes some people manufacture items and ships, but to do this requires hours and hours of mining to be able to make one item, 50 of which will be used to make another item, which will be one of 20-30 different parts(each of which thousand may be needed) used to make a single ship. The act of mining is so tedious and simplistic I wouldn’t even pause Dragon Age while I did it. Fly to a location target an asteroid, start mining, stop mining, return to base, rinse repeat 10 times an hour.

Combat is simplistic, you attack or are attacked, you target the enemy ship and select the weapons to use (lasers, guns, missiles) then it is a test of firepower, everything is automatic until one ship is destroyed or runs away. The additions of fields which block escape or repair your ship are slight improvements, but not enough to make combat worth the time since if you are destroyed, you lose your ship and eject in an escape pod, if that is destroyed you are cloned at the cost of some skill points.

I did like the training system that was employed, leveling up was all about you assigned to learn a skill (bought from other players in the form of a book) as opposed to repetitive action. Having this training continue even after you logged off made me feel like I was accomplishing something even while I was not playing…but that feeling was short lived for this trial as in a mere 4 days my patience was begging to move on to the next game.

 

The ingame story for this game is comprised of small missions assigned by NPC “agents”. Aside from that, the entire story is driven by internal conflicts between corporations, all of which are controlled by in game players and (aside from random, and rare pirate encounters) this takes a significant level of planning to even be in the same region of space to initiate a large scale battle as is constantly advertised in the promos for this game.

I must admit, even with the slightly lower system requirements, the game is beautiful….well as beautiful as empty space can get. While you are unable to interact with planets or moons, any more than going into orbit around them. the effects of Warping and the detail given to each ship is quite impressive.

Once again this is almost non-existent. The only way to get involved with the community is to join a corporation (none of whom would even consider me for membership while I was flying a low level ship, even after explaining that I was writing an independent review for the game). there is an open chat system where anything you type will be viewable by your friends, all people in the system, or all people in the game depending on the chat channel you are in. there is no cooperation between pilots, no dialog, not even insults. People are far too worried about destroying their ships to even enter PvP with anything but small shuttles (provided for free an any base) .

 

All purchases are based on items made by players. While this free economy is a refreshing turn from most games I’ve played allowing transactions to take place and a trade system to form based on market pricing (which is easily browsed to find good deals) but this relies on patience since once you take items from one location to another for sale, you must wait until a player buys them to make any money.

There are options for some quick cash, there is a simple sell option that will turn the items over to the NPC stations at a rate always significantly below market. The limited interaction with the community I had shows that they frown on this since it takes away from available resources in the market place (not that this ore is hard to find in the world, or the marketplace, but since there is no way for them to know how you are selling your items, I went for the fast/easy.

The main downside of an economy like this is that 90% of items are strongly inflated. If the item is regularly available, it becomes worthless, if slightly hard to get, the item costs hundreds of millions(or billions) of in game currency.

Dreadnaught class ship; 21,000,000,000.00 isk

Civilian mining laser; 2.85 isk

Average earnings per hour at termination; 150,000 isk

 

This is a hard one to count. The reason I am quitting early on this 14 day trial is that I have progressed as far as I can before the glass ceiling hit. On a trial membership, most ships and skills are blocked from me due to the trial status. But without those stronger skills and ships I am unable to move forward into other areas where the NPC missions take me. This game held my interest for almost 2 days before the repetitive nature and lack of depth turned me away. Strange that I have lost so much interest in this game from the short experience I’ve had with it. But it only took a small amount of research to learn that there is a universal “Best ship and setup” for each goal, and anyone playing the game for long enough has it. This “hand of God” solution immediately kills the game for me since everyone who has played for a while uses them preventing any variance from this standard if you wish to compete.

 

This actually has a very steep learning curve, mining and general game play are moderate, and can be learned in about 20min. However to even start to understand the skill tree (which I still don’t understand) and crafting system takes much more time than I am willing to give to this game.

The controls are little more than point and click interfaces but are matched up with a plethora of quick keys that are a common feature for most MMOs. The camera can get annoying sometimes but when kept at a moderate distance from your ship, it offers a good detailed view of your surroundings (which normally consists of empty space and the occasional asteroid, ship or wreckage.). The killing point here is the lack of any sort of in-depth control, when approaching an object, your ship will often spas out, bump into it, spin uncontrollably, or on occasion randomly fly away toward the nearest object..

 

I considered this game to be a waste of hard drive and bandwidth. While the early game play was intriguing, the game did not get any deeper, and the learning curve to progress further was far too much. If you are into games that are virtually autonomous and lack any story, by all means go for it, but this gamer is not willing to spend $35 per 2 months of gameplay to just mine ore, sell it and mine it again. Based on other reviews and descriptions, the repetitiveness is almost nonstop. The only thing that changes is moving your mining operations into more dangerous areas of space, into the places I could not go on a trial membership.

Hours played; 12

Enemy ships destroyed; 4

Missions completed; 6

Money earned; 750,000 ISK

Times Died; 0

Most time spent; Mining/traveling.