I was looking forward to this one, but the more I play it the more things I find about it that drive me nuts. At this point I've pretty much lost all desire to continue playing it.
The game spouts its 'fully destructive environments" like a mantra, yet in random sectors the vast majority of asteroids can't be destroyed at all and are purely there to make the space seem less empty. And because of the so-called fully destructive environments, the load times are absolutely ridiculous. Every time you die or move to another sector you're met with an obnoxiously long loading screen.
The combat is simple and repetitious (enemies fly at you in a straight line, to kill them just shoot with missiles/bullets until they pop). There's many different kinds of weapons, including chem weapons which kill the pilot without destroying his ship, so you can scavenge his stuff for extra profit. In theory, anyway. In practice, your ever-present bastard of a wingman will usually destroy the ship before you can scavenge it. Speaking of how big of a bastard he his, if you are not careful he will end up flying right in front of your face at the absolute most inopportune moment, such as when you're shooting a rocket at something.
I should say something about the mining -- it was one of the things I was most looking forward to. Given that the game is called "Miner Wars" you might expect mining to be a major aspect of gameplay. Indeed, you can carve your way through asteroids to find and harvest various minerals, and it is kind of neat to be able to carve twisting 3D mazes into the hearts of asteroids. However it is also rather boring, and the ores are only used for money, and fuel depending on the engine your ship is using. I've also yet to see any sort of pattern or reason as to where you can find various minerals. Regardless of where I am in the solar system, I keep finding the exact same low-grade ore, and I can only find the high-grade stuff in named areas / campaign sections. Maybe I just suck at finding stuff, but I feel like the ore generation could use an overhaul, and the ore could benefit from having further uses as well. It would be cool if you could carve out a space for yourself and set up a base inside of it, collect minerals and build up ships/weapons for yourself -- something like minecraft in space. But Minewars feels nothing like this.
Something else which drives me nuts is the inventory system. For example, you may have four fuel tanks each with 25% fill. Can you combine them into one unit at 100%? Nope. The ship will draw from whichever one is last in the inventory until it is empty and disappears, then it will draw from the next one. This same concept applies also for missiles and bullets and armor and health packs and everything else. Meanwhile as you collect more stuff, the item that was previously being used will no longer be last in the inventory, so it just stays there at some fractional fill as you now draw from a new one. The result is that you have to constantly micromanage your inventory or else it inevitably becomes completely cluttered with fractional units which is a complete pain in the ass. Seriously devs, make it so partially-filled units can be combined into full ones, preferably automatically.
Good points for the game are the campaign missions/story which are reasonably interesting, and the graphics/backgrounds which are quite pretty. Navigation is made easy by a GPS interface which when used plots a helpful course to the goal; quite nice in some of the more maze-like areas. The voice acting is OK, not great. I haven't tried the multiplayer so I can't say anything about that.
