Space, it’s really, really big and most of it is dull. Unfortunately, so is the subject of this review; Evochron Mercenary. Evochron Mercenary is an indie space flight simulator in which you play a mercenary out to make money any way you see fit. In order to make money, you can fight in space combat, race for bet money, or carry cargo and more. The main positive about this game is the freedom you have to choose what to do. You can choose from four classes of ships; Mercenary, Combat Pilot, Trader/Miner, and Racer.  You can also upgrade your ships how you like and decide what quests to take.

Other positives I took from the game were how huge the scope felt, as well as great controls that took me some time to master but eventually gave me huge freedom to move my ship how I pleased. I even found the graphics to be decent for an indie game, especially in the genre. However, those details aside, I soon found myself frustrated. Firstly, when I started as a Combat Pilot, I found the missions to be screen-punchingly frustrating. Despite being the combat ship class, I found that regardless of which mission I selected, I was repeatedly outnumbered and outgunned. Sometimes my ship would be carved in half within seconds of arriving in a battle zone.  I tried every combination of weapons and shields I could.

Secondly, and even more frustratingly, several missions required arriving at waypoints, but several of the waypoints didn’t seem to give any indication of what to do next.  This was especially frustrating in missions that required using a tractor beam to collect cargo that didn’t seem to be appearing any time soon. Then there were the missions that were too easy, such as destroying asteroids or delivering cargo by flying into a green box. Add into these problems the fact that some ships seemed undeniably worse than others, the difficulty in ending up where you actually wanted to go using the warp drive, and a trade system that always seemed to have ships out of range, and I was left ruing the space in my wallet where the money had come from.

That said, the most frustrating thing about Evochron Mercenary was that I felt it had potential. The game felt huge and gave you plenty to do but at the expense of focus. As with many non-linear games, the quests were repetitive cut and paste copies of each other, and some of the early missions were too difficult for introductory missions whereas others were money for nothing. But mainly, I had an issue with it because it wasn’t fun; missions were either frustrating or boring with nothing keeping me on the edge of my seat. I felt like I was simply grinding money so I could do another mission for money to keep the cycle going and never achieving anything. I’m sure there are people out there who will enjoy this game for what it is, but I would find it hard to recommend this game.