Quantum Genesis Hyperspeed Space Redux by Tim Leach
Premise
You are The Unnamed Protagonist. You are an ex-military thrill seeker in a neon-drenched, technofuturistic, geometrically questionable outer space. Your mission is to take yourself and your slightly temperamental spaceship, the Über Lightblaze Mk IV - Starrunner Theta, as far into Saturn's rings as you can.
Controls
- Steer: Move Mouse
- Boost: Left Mouse Button
- Break: Right Mouse Button
- Pause: Esc/p/m
Credits
The Colonel
A high-ranking member of the Neo-Mars Socialist People's Liberation Army (colloquially known as "The Red Army"), the Colonel left his home planet to lend his able hand to expunging the rest of the solar system of the evil capitalist scourge.
An able pilot, he taught The Unnamed Protagonist how to fly a Starrunner-class frigate on a brief guerrilla skirmish above Titan, Saturn's largest moon (and the site of its capital).
Dynamo
Raised alongside The Unnamed Protagonist on the mean streets of Saturn's Capital, New Neo New York City, Dynamo made a living extorting powerful people by hacking their biotech with ransomware. His calling card is leaving all the tech in a building playing bass-y synth-y beats.
VENTI-3000
VENTI-3000, or VEhicular Navigation and Training Interface, is the on-board AI navigation system of the Über Lightblaze Mk IV - Starrunner Theta. She is extremely difficult to manage if you don't know what you're doing but easy enough to manage if you do. Even though she cannot drink, she is very fond of the idea of alcohol.
We STRONGLY recommend downloading and playing one of the standalone builds, rather than the HTML5 version, as the latter does not include some ✨aesthetic choices✨ that we think really improve the feel of the game.
Ratings
| Given | 7🗳️ | 3🗨️ |
Art and style were fun and I like the little intro scene even though sometimes it was hard to hear "dynamo"
The controls took some getting used to, but after a while I started to get the hang of them; I've played a fair bit of Ace Combat, so Pitch-Roll controls are fairly familiar to me which helped a great deal.
As DecrementedPalindrome pointed out, a lot of the awkwardness around the rings was caused by the camera not being locked to the axis of your ship, which made it tricky to predict your relative orientation to the ring. What Ace Combat lets you do is hold down a button to make the camera track your current target - perhaps you could implement that on the middle mouse button to let the player choose between the two camera modes rather than it being automatic.
That said, in a game where the only gameplay is flying a ship, I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing for the controls to be a bit awkward. If you could pick them up immediately, the game would be rather trivial - as it was, once I got to the point where I could get to the next ring efficiently, it felt pretty satisfying to feel like I had mastered the controls!