As someone who has around 1400 hours in to Elite: Dangerous, I’m no stranger to space flight sims. Sadly, I reached a point in that game where I had done it all. It’s such a vast game but players are starting to burn through the content faster than the devs can create it because they’re too busy nerfing all the ways to make money within a reasonable time frame, so, I quit.
Fast forward about 5 months.
My craving for a good flight game has started to get the better of me so I started looking around. Steam is full of flight games but a short read through their descriptions and their reviews make my decision pretty easy. Hard pass. None of them really seem to have the appeal that will draw you in for hundreds of hours.
I see mentions of Star Citizen during my reading and laugh “What a Ponzi scheme. I can’t believe they’re still solvent”. A game announced in 2011 with a release date of 2015 only to be delayed again in 2016. As of 2017 with almost $116 million in funding and still in alpha, there has been no release date set. Yeah…doesn’t look good on the cover.
I keep looking only to come up empty. Little voice in my head starts getting louder You know Grumpy, you sit there and berate Star Citizen but you’ve never played it.
I navigate to the Star Citizen webpage only to find that the first rumors I’d heard are grossly wrong. You can buy a game package for as low as $45 when all I’d been told is you could only buy ships starting at $500 to help fund development. This might have been true when it was first announced back in 2011.
I think to myself, “you’ve never been in on the ground floor of a game, where better to start than one of the most cost controversial games out there?” Needless to say, I decided to pick up the $60 package. Yeah, that’s a lot of money for a game in the damn alpha stage but it’s the average price of most AAA games. I bring that up because I plan to play this to release and review it as I go along. Exclusively on GRG.
So here I sit, downloading and updating the launcher to the game I have been known to bash repeatedly when it’s brought up in conversation… Star Citizen.
I’ll continue to update this as time goes on. I plan to give it a fair shake right up to release. (Provided that ever actually happens)