Playing Avorion off and on for the last five years has been one of the most important early access success stories I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing. From humble beginnings where there was little more to do than mine resources and build ships to the expansive quest lines, empire building, and polished procedural generation goodness you can experience today.
Maybe you’ve already heard the classic Avorion talking points in the steam reviews and Reddit comments praising the freedom of the game.
Wanna be a pirate?
Mercenary?
Build and command a mining or trade fleet?
Start a faction from scratch with your friends on your server whose only goal devolves into completely wiping the Democratic Conglomerate of Ifta from the map because they declared war on you for collecting some legitimate salvage and made your early game hell? You can do all that and much, much more.
The learning curve in Avorion is steep, but approachable
All that’s required of you to embark on the adventure of your sci-fi-loving dreams is getting past a steep learning curve. The game now has a tutorial coupled with some very helpful early quests, a luxury us early space farers weren’t given, but there are really 3 curves built into one that you will need to get past.
First, you will have to get the hang of flying and combat. Luckily this is the easiest of the three. Next, you’ll have to put all those skills you acquired playing with legos as a kid to use while building your own starter ship (add a dash of space flight mechanics). Some templates are available to you in the game and plenty of steam workshop downloads to have fun with if this isn’t your cup of tea, but I highly encourage you to give it a shot. Building ships (and eventually a whole fleet) that are unique to you and your imagination adds some gratifying feedback into the gameplay loop of Avorion. The last learning curve will be the reasonably deep economy of the game. This will require a lot of reading and trial and error but is very doable.
Don’t be turned off by the initial repetitiveness in Avorion
The biggest criticism Avorion gets that I think can be warranted is its repetitiveness. Avorion is based in a procedurally generated Galaxy, potentially generating 1 million sectors to visit.
It’s massive.
To reach any given sector, you are required to spin up your warp drive and make a jump (with a loading screen). Most quests will take you many sectors away from their starting place and while there are wormholes and jump gates (space highways) that can take you farther, it’s safe to say that you will spend a lot of time jumping from sector to sector looking at loading screens. Can that get annoying and repetitive? Yes. Should it turn you off of the game?
Absolutely not.
There’s a mechanic in shipbuilding that allows you to increase how many sectors your ship’s warp drive can reach each jump, and some other mechanics in the game that I won’t spoil which allow travel to happen more easily.
Gameplay in Avorion
You won’t see any humanoids or aliens on your journey, at least not in person. Instead, you’ll spend all your time piloting your ship, interacting with or engaging in combat with other ships or objects in space.
While you do have a crew, they act as a gameplay mechanic that you manage. I think this is a benefit overall, because it allows you to make the story of you, your crew, your fleet, your empire, whatever you want it to be in your headcanon. Although you don’t see your crew, that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
A ship with a fully staffed, well-experienced crew will be much more efficient, particularly in combat, than a motley crew of underpaid rock hoppers crammed into overfilled crew quarters. Leave the working conditions bad enough, and they will eventually go on strike and leave the ship altogether for a more accommodating captain.
The gameplay can range from micromanaging an empire to piloting a specific combat mercenary ship for the whole game. Still, the core gameplay mechanic of resource collection, shipbuilding, combat, loot, and quests is enough to keep you engaged for tens or even hundreds of hours.
That being said, this really is a game about building ships. That’s the main motivator to get closer to the galaxy’s center, where more danger and better ship-building materials await. And when it comes to your ship, your imagination and patience is really the only limit to what can be created.
Combat in Avorion
Combat in Avorion is surprisingly fun. The physics are arcadey enough to be very approachable and work excellently with the mouse and keyboard, but they give you enough realism to be satisfying.
Battles can be huge and take many forms depending on your gameplay preferences. However, they usually involve flying within range of your enemies and peppering them with all the weapons at your disposal. Each weapon fires differently and has advantages and disadvantages, so you must plan your loadout accordingly. Combat changes based on the class of ship you’re flying as well.
A nimble Corvette might be able to cut through a swarm of enemies with boom and zoom tactics, but a big, heavy carrier might want to try to stay on the edge of the dogfight and send its automated fighters in to do the fighting for them.
Conclusion
Avorion is a masterclass in sandbox gameplay. It has something for everyone and if you’re a space nerd like myself and want to embark on a journey into the great expanse that doesn’t keep you on the rails, I encourage you to pick this game up and give it a try.
With regular updates from Boxelware and a new DLC “Into the Rift” that launched a few months ago, I think this is the best time to pick it up or jump back in.
