I purchased it based on the great reviews and, while it's not a terrible game, I had just purchased Space Miner. And quite honestly, I have a lot more fun playing with Space Miner. Due to space limits on my iPod Touch (8 GB), I've actually deleted Warpgate. I'm sure I'll play it at a later date, but I honestly was bored with the gameplay after playing Space Miner. Am I in the minority? Maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance.
How far have you gotten into Warpgate? I have beaten and love both games. I have spent similar # of hours in both. I wish Warpgate would implement a fast travel system and improve ship to ship combat.
I think both are fun, but in different ways. I've heard from some that depending on how you play, Warpgate can really be a long lasting experience. Space Miner may be shorter but I know there are a number of people that have put dozens of hours to play the different difficulties and such.
While I am bored of Warpgate now, I do not regret the 5 bucks I paid for hours and hours of gameplay.
Kinda. After a while, I just said "what is the gameplay?" and realized that it's basically just buying things with yellow arrows on them and selling them elsewhere until you have enough money to buy a bigger ship. And buy more yellow-arrow items. There was no real challenge involved because money was so abundant, and combat was just a way to exhibit your ship in more detail.
I had the exact same feeling/realization. The graphic engine was nice, but there wasn't really any skill based or strategic gameplay, and the story was too disjointed and vague to keep me playing. I played about five or six hours of it total trying to give it a chance to grow on me, but decided it just wasn't what I'd expected for most of the time that I'd been waiting for it, and just wasn't for me. As you said, it was essentially just going from warpgate to warpgate to buy and sell without any strategy, skill, or twitched based gameplay, and I just found myself getting really bored by it.
Space Miner is a great game. I've recommended it to anyone I know looking for a fun little game. But it's not gonna last you long. Warpgate may never leave my device, and certainly not anytime soon. I think a lot of the disappointed customers simply didn't understand the game they were buying, which is pretty silly considering the wealth of information out about the game by the time it released. Warpgate has been everything I expected it to be, the production values are top notch, Freeverse has been active in supporting the game with fixes and user requested features, and plan to continue to support it with further content down the road. Assuming you know what the game is before buying, what's not to like?
The funny thing is i get excited about new games coming out that look good but then when there out i play on them for a day or 2 then thats it, i leave it and move onto another game..
Oh, I knew what the gameplay was like. I just didn't realize it would be so... static. I love trading-based games (Mount & Blade comes to mind), but there was something... missing from Warpgate. I think its first problem was its lack of randomization. A randomized universe could have done a lot for it. As it stands, making money is as easy as finding a system that needs something and heading to a nearby system and buying up as much as you can, and then selling. For example, Alcor always seems to need Ultaraxe Crystals. Just head to its neighbor, buy up a bunch, return, sell, rinse and repeat. I think its second biggest problem was that there was rarely any skill involved. Buying and selling was all static, as previously stated, and combat was essentially mash buttons, pray you win. There was never any other problems to really worry about. Balancing faction allegiance was an interesting concept, I guess, but it was hard to make everyone dislike you, so there was very little "actual" danger. Its cardinal sin, if you will, was that there didn't seem to be any overarching objective. Sure, these types of games are all about setting your own goals, but what goals could you set? Make x dollars? Mine x asteroids? Games like Mount & Blade succeed due to the sheer amount of stuff can do: taking over towns, training a strong army, building relationships with individual kings, becoming an excellent lancer/sword fighter/archer, etc. Warpgate was pretty much just "get rich." I certainly don't think it's wrong to dislike it, and I really wish I did. I'm sure watching that little number on the bottom of the screen go makes some people giddy with delight, but I need... more depth. Which, perhaps, is too much to ask of an iPhone game.
Yes, absolutely! Like you I bought it based on the universally perfect reviews it was getting, & soon deleted it. How anyone can even play this is beyond my comprehension. The combat is about as interesting as a turd in a pool.