I wasnt sure about this game when I first purchased it because so far I havent liked any games to do with space, but after playing this for a little bit found that I quite enjoyed the game, a little bit addictive & I didnt want to put it down.

I showed another family member who wanted a copy for themselves after watching me play the game, I haven't played it alot yet but have found it is a great puzzle/strategy game with a bit of a challenge.

Technical: There is so much saving and loading in the game it feels like I\'ve gone back to the days of games on floppy disk. Whenever you leave a system to go to the galactic map, the game spends a noticable amount of time loading, as it does when you return to a system after passing through a gate. Every time you leave an encounter (or exit your inventory/grou­p/ship/quest/et­c) screen, the game saves, again taking a noticable amount of time. Overall the game play is interrupted far too often to make it feel comfortable.

Mechanics: The new puzzle mechanic is interesting and takes some time to get used to. After getting a hold on how it works, I was still often feeling frustrated with the game since it feels like it often works more off chance than skill. The freedom of movement from the hexagonal gems often results in quite long chains of matching, and the longer the chain, the higher the effect of the matched gems. This means that in tough battles it\'s quite possible to have your ship be destroyed in just a couple of lucky chains by the opponent (thus the frustration).

Overall the game mechanics have a steep learning curve, and the documentation in the manual is pretty much nonexistant, leaving most of the learning to come from trial and error.

Difficulty: Apart from the mechanics of the puzzle game, at the stage where I am in the game, the difficulty seems wildly varied. Hacking gates and defeating random enemies is quite easy, defeating story enemies and successfully mining asteroids is quite difficult (in the case of one story enemy we\'re talking about two hours of repeating the fight until I got enough lucky breaks on the gem board to defeat it due to a disparity in item/ability level).