izigame.me

I've only done one mission so far. Surely, you're thinking, that's too soon for a review? NONSENSE. I have Opinions-with-a-capital-O and I'm keen to share them. This game compares well to Pulsar (Lost Colony), and I'm going to get there.
But obviously the first question is, "Yea or nay?" And it's a yea: Get this game. With two caveats. (They're minor things, those caveats, I just want to be bit melodramatic.)
What the game is is basically Spaceship Crew Simulator, same as Pulsar. You will go crew a ship, and that ship will be sent off to achieve goals. Many of those goals involve combat. There are a number of stations aboard the ship, and you can't manage everything at once. So bring friends!
Pulsar is very much a game trying to riff on Star Trek, and it has teleportation, away teams, handheld lasers and that sort of thing.
Void Crew feels like it's got a much harder scifi edge to it. Your characters have their consciousnesses beamed to fabricated bodies in the ship. There's no handheld weapons (as of this writing), nor teleportation. Though you can fly in hard vacuum with a personal jetpack. My buddies likened it to "E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy", I guess, but I got more of an "Eclipse Phase" feel. Splitting hairs, perhaps.
Pulsar... it's a very indie game, and I love a good, pucky, indie game. But it also has severe indie-itis in that a lot of the systems are near-impenetrable. I've never gotten very far in it, even after they added the tutorials.
Void Crew was much more polished, intuitive, and graphically pleasing as well. It wasn't hard to find things or do things, and the tutorial covered all the major systems in 10-ish minutes. You could hit the ground running and do all the major ship functions. So a much easier experience to get into, by far.
So if you liked Pulsar, but you wanted a more polished, intuitive experience, it is Void Crew, easily. There's a few other differences here and there, though.
Primarily, you can self-sabotage in Void Crew pretty easily. First, there's not enough power to go around; you can't run everything at once. You can selectively control the power on items, and you can overload the generator for shortish periods of time, though it will steadily blow breakers which need to be reset. The starter ship, for instance, can not run thrusters and both guns for very long.
So your teamies need to be mindful. Turn off that turret if you're not using it. Don't leave the gravity beam running.
Secondly, while using the airlock isn't a super-intricate process, it does require a degree of mindfulness. Close one door. Cycle the air pressure. Don or doff the jetpack as required. Open the other door. Get this wrong, and you kill yourself (using up vital resources the ship has little of), or you vent the ship's atmosphere, leaving the survivors to scramble to prevent that.
Thirdly, the ship takes wear and tear from battle damage which can't be fully repaired. You need an observant pilot who can dodge shots and track that sort of thing in three-space.
In short, if you're prone to momentary lapses of attention, you're gonna get your fellow crew members really stroppy at you and you may not be invited to go spaceship with them if you make a habit of it.
Now, the first caveat: You need other players. The small ship runs best with three people, and the big ship runs best with four, but you can get by with a reduced crew if you're comfortable multi-tasking. There's a ship that can theoretically be used solo, but it's not very good at much of anything, I hear. The game expects a team, and even has its own VOIP! (Be sure to set yourself to push to talk if you share a Discord server, though!)
The other, smaller caveat: It's really 2.5D in a way. You can't roll or pitch the ship. This is a gripe for me, since most of what I did was the pilotry. It will help people stay oriented and maybe combat motion sickness, but I was verrrry slightly annoyed by it. I'm the kind of guy who has a HOTAS for playing Elite Dangerous, though, so you can take this complaining with a great big dumptruck load of salt.
It may be a bit challenging to tell players apart, as there weren't any names floating over people. So... good lord, we had to communicate. As the pilot, I'd ask for confirmation people were seated before launching, because apparently warping without being seated results in being splatted. So. Much. Talking! But I like it.
And maybe I got a bit bossy even though I denoted somebody else as captain. Though I'm a bit bossy by default and try to keep that in check. Ah well!
Looking forward to more missions soon, though! And that's your thumbs up.