You start with a basic ship that isn't capable of much, and a weapon that doesn't do much damage. However, you are greeted with an excellent tutorial that teaches you the basics of movement and combat. Finishing it nets you experience points, giving you a little boost to starting out.Experience points are divided into five categories: Combat, Light Weapons, Heavy Weapons, Trading and Commerce, and Mining. It's a skill-based gaining system, so as you use light weapons, you'll gain experience in the Light Weapons category. There are levels, but not in the traditional sense, because they have no affect on weapon strength or anything. When you level up, you simply gain access to new weapons and ships that are more and more powerful.It's not all about experience, as there are a dozen or so factions in the game. The big three of course are the Itani, Serco, and UIT, and your standing with them affects many things. If you're in high standing with a race, you can get cheaper products or special ships. Low standing results in the enemy automatically opening fire at you, if it's bad enough. Your starting race affects your initial standing, but fortunately, if you work hard enough, you can overcome the worst faction deficit. Because of the friction of the back story, it would make more sense for an Itani to never be allowed to buy special ships from the Serco, and vice versa.Once you're in the game, you'll find yourself in a space station. This is another major downside: all business takes place inside space stations. You can see other celestial bodies, such as planets, but you cannot actually explore or indeed land on any of them. It makes the universe just a little too spacious, no pun intended. It's just too empty, and too lonely.In fact, the sheer size of the universe is actually a downfall. There are 30 systems, each with 256 sectors, for a total of over 7500 different locations players can go to. That's a lot of area, and as a result most of it is empty. While you play, you won't run into many players at all except in sectors that hold stations. The game is extremely lonely unless you specifically look for ways for it not to be.This is especially true with mining. VO gets some credit for coming up with a great way to keep players from camping in a spot and getting material. Mining is comprised of equipping a ship with a mining beam, then shooting an asteroid. The beam attaches to the asteroid, and as long as you don't press your fire button a second time, you'll be pulling resources out if. Unlike Ultima Online and others, you can't "mine out" an asteroid. However, as you mine the same asteroid, it heats up. The hotter it gets, the slower it is getting materials out of it. If you wanted to, you could sit at the asteroid all day and pull materials out of it. However, it eventually takes an hour or longer to get even one unit, which is why moving around is important if you value your free time. The major problem with mining, aside from it being excruciatingly lonely, is what to do with materials. Mining, in a sense, is completely pointless. There is no crafting at all, so the only reason to mine is to immediately sell the materials to a station. The only difference between being a miner and being a pure trader is that mining has no overhead. You can tell that VO tacked on mining as an afterthought; also, if you check the website help files, they mention four types of licenses, not mining. Why should you care about an activity when the game makers didn't care enough to explain its point (if it has any)?And that really hurts when you think about what mining could have led to. Custom ships? Custom weapons? Player-made space stations? More efficient batteries and engines? The list goes on of what could be, but isn't.So without mining, the game almost entirely centers on combat. And I have to admit, dogfighting against enemies--from computer-controlled "bots" to other players--can be pretty exciting. Seeing two skilled pilots in action is pretty thrilling to watch, not to mention being a part of. Again though, with the universe being as large as it is, fights are hard to get into unless you actively seek them out.But you can seek them out easily, if you know how. You can be a pirate, although it takes a good ship and a great deal of skill to be good at it. But you have to be careful where you pirate, because if you mess around too much in space owned by any of the three nations, your standing will plummet and that nation's guards will come after you. Gray space has no rules, and subsequently has the best resources and so on, so there's a balance.There must be some balance to being a pirate, and it comes in the form of a bounty hunter. Once your license levels are high enough, you can apply to hunt pirates. Every time a pirate kills, bounties start piling up. Only someone who is registered as a bounty hunter can actually collect the reward for whacking a pirate, which makes it a pretty lucrative and fairly exclusive job.
PvP (Player versus Player) is almost entirely consensual. There's no switch or anything, but you are protected if you are inside space controlled by your faction. Also, no member can hurt other members in his own faction unless either the attacker or target has an extremely low faction rating. You can request a duel with a fellow faction member however, and it must be accepted or your attacks will do nothing. That applies no matter where in the universe you are.Most of your combat will probably be against bots, and most of that will be in form of missions. At every space station, you can pick up missions to earn extra experience and money. While there are surveying and trading missions, most missions are combative. Like weapons and ships, more and more missions are opened up as your license levels, but they don't get too much more complex.All this is meaningless if you can't fly, but again VO does something wonderful. Sporting two flying modes, you can either play in arcade or physics mode. Arcade is easier to control, but physics allow you to do cool moves like spinning around and firing while moving backwards. Flying in arcade mode is extremely easy and will come naturally to anyone who's played anything like Freelancer. Physics mode requires practice, but it comes in handy in fights. Either way, flying feels very natural and is easily the strongest part of the game.The real problem with VO becomes prominent after you play it for ten hours or so. There are missions, there is pointless mining, there is PvP… but what else is there? The missions don't feel like you're doing anything. In modern MMOs, quests tend to feel like you're making a difference, or you at least give you a big reward for your efforts. Missions in VO simply give you an excuse to blow crap up, which you can do by going to a bot-filled sector anyway. The rewards for missions are all experience and money, but never items or weapons.In short, there's just not much to do. The game feels like one big grind, especially without crafting. You'll play, and you'll sample everything, but the question of that will be nagging you is, "Why?" The only semblance of a change to the universe is the fact that when you trade with stations, supply and demand come into play. So, you can't get rich with a single trade route like you could with Freelancer, but that's about it. If there was some sort of overall goal you could work toward, such as building your own space stations or giving material to a station to unlock new weapons or ships, the game would be much more tolerable. You'd feel like you were contributing to a cause, something to unify players and bring sense to the endless mining and shooting. And in all fairness, perhaps such a system is in the game's future.But as it is right now, doing anything in VO feels so pointless that it truly feels like work. Blow up stuff and mine to get money, spend money on a better ship, repeat ad nauseam.What makes this frustrating in an odd sense is how stable the game is. This is one lag-free, bug-free, exploit-free game. This type of stability is what all MMOs should be. And yet, despite all the silky smoothness of the way the game runs, it's simply not fun after a few hours.
GraphicsTechnically speaking, the graphics are "okay." You're not going to feel like you're actually in outer space, but you're not going to go blind either.However, there's just something about the style of all the graphics that is really interesting. From the neon billboards on all the space stations to the perfect balance between style and substance on the ships, everything in VO says "plausibility." Almost as if we could peer into the future and see spaceships in 2400 years, they would probably look something like this.Still, there isn't a whole lot of variety between the different ships. All ships are a dark gray, except for a stripe that you can customize. Fighters look a little sleeker and transport ships look a little boxier, but that's about the extent of differences.There is plenty of variety to the celestial bodies and space stations so you won't get bored, and you'll easily be able to recognize particular bases and sectors when you visit them enough times. The backgrounds are pretty bland and static, but they're definitely suitable.The weapon effects are pretty cool, and the ship explosions are prominent without being distracting. I do like the graphics overall, but I've always been more tolerant of graphics than most of you young whippersnappers, with your Doom 3 and your Half-Life 2.SoundThe sound effects are as bland as bland can be. It's not grating, but it sounds straight out of a 16-bit game. There's no voice whatsoever, and unfortunately there are no audible clues when messages are sent back and forth. This leads to you needlessly eying your chat messages to make sure you don't miss anything important.The music is pretty good, until you realize you're hearing the same small selection of tunes over and over. The first time you enter a combat sector, your chest will swell as the hypnotic cadence mixes with your engines, and you'll feel ready to take on the universe. But after you enter your 10th or 20th combat zone, and hear the same cadence, you'll be wishing for a larger soundtrack. Let's not mention what you'll be wishing for after the 100th entry into a combat zone.