Fractured Space Review
Capital Ship Space MOBA

I want to start this article by saying: I HATE MOBA’S! I can’t stand them. Either you’re sitting there doing 1 damage every second against a target that has 1 million hitpoints waiting for your team to come help which always gives me a sense of uselessness that is really a turn off for me in a game or one person is just generally being a total asshole to the entire team or any combination of all of the above and it just ruins the game for me since the majority of the time it’s honestly just the asshole that ruins the game. On a game with 32 or more players you can just ignore someone like him/her, but on a team with only 4/5 others, you can’t.
So to put simply, once I heard a “space game” I was intrigued cause I love space games, but once I heard “MOBA” I snubbed my noise at it and ignored it. But against my will I was forced to get it (back when it was still paid for but free for a weekend) to try it out. I was not happy about it, I was not looking forward to it, and I was seriously expecting to uninstall it once the first round was over.

Free-to-Play means lots of skins to buy.

To my surprise, one of my major hangups, the feeling of uselessness, never showed up. I felt like I could actually do something, with or without team assistance. I felt like almost any ship I chose I could almost handle anything that came my way. Of course being a team based game you can’t take on the team solo, you do need help. But it doesn’t feel like once you see an enemy you should just run or give up. At the very least you can do damage before running away if you have to then group up to take it on again. So for you classic moba players like Dota or League you already can already tell of similar gameplay styles. But since I have never played either of those, or indeed any “big”/“popular” moba out there I can’t give you a checklist of stuff that’s similar so the rest of this is going to be written as it should: a reluctant moba player that has never played any before, cause that’s true. So if I sound dumb or misinformed, that’s not intentional.

My new, tough support ship, the Superlifter.

The basic Moba mechanics still apply, attackers do a lot of damage to defenders and vise versa, snipers do a lot of damage at range but are useless up close, cloaked ships do only alpha damage but if they can’t kill you once they decloak, their’s a high chance they’re going to die right then and there, and other standard moba mechanics I’m sure.

I’m assuming the fact that all the ships are “capital” meaning “big ass mother,” from the Latin word “phat,” (yes that’s a joke, don’t complain) means that the majority of ships can take a pounding before going down, short of cloakers, snipers and healers of course. And if you’re out gunned you can run…if you’re smart on when/where to jump. Once you start to jump anywhere, either back to base (which takes longer to charge) or anywhere else you select, your ship takes double damage while it’s spinning up. So that means if you’re surrounded, taking a pounding and decide to jump, you’re most likely going to die there too. Only some ships get some kind of defense like an emergency shield to protect them that can run for a few seconds to mitigate/stop the damage but if you don’t time everything just right, you will die there. But if you’re smart, the area of which you’re fighting in is littered with things to hide behind, a station, asteroids, etc. So run first, get something between you and the enemy then jump.
Each side has a base, there are three lanes to fight in, two of which you will be in 90% of the time. The third middle lane contains the “game changer” Gamma station to capture that comes online every 5 minutes or so but there’s no cover or reason to fight in that lane because there is nothing other than gamma to capture. The rest of the lanes have mines which you must capture to give you and your team an edge. When you capture mines they give resources which over time improves your ships. Once they reach level 3, 6, and 9 you can choose a big upgrade for your ship. Attack Upgrade which gives you more damage, fire rate, and capture speed, Defense Upgrade which gives you more health, damage reduction, and armor repair speed, or Utility Upgrade which gives you more utility power (for point defense and other special weapons/defenses), faster recharge of utility power, and faster cooldown of utility abilities. You can only choose these upgrades, and indeed get your ship upgraded either at your base or at the forward base that you own in each main lane. Or if you can’t do that and you died you will respawn with an upgrade ship.
Level 9 upgrades are as high as anyone can get, after that there’s no point in capturing mines. But of course if the enemy team hasn’t maxed out, keeping the mines from them will help you. You will also get a small “boost” of resources when you capture stations or destroy ships. They are very minor boosts so don’t relay on that upgrading your ship.

At the start of a game, you get to choose the ship you want to fly and its weapon load out.

Of course being a moba, team work is required. As much as I said you don’t feel useless by yourself and taking on someone, teamwork will win the day. If you have no healer, you have to play defensively. If they have a sniper (or snipers as I’ve seen) you have to play aggressively (because if you just hide you’re not doing anything and the enemy is taking your mines) and hope to the gamer gods that they can’t hit the broadside of a small moon and that hopefully your cloaking teammate won’t focus on his/her K/D (or with this game T/D: Takedowns, Deaths) and actually support your team and ignore everything but the snipers and healers on the enemy team.
Like any game (I personally feel) the healer is under appreciated. The majority of the time they’re yelled at for doing there job because they’re not “healing fast enough” or “not healing me” because your ship that still has 95% health left needs a repair compared to this other ship which could die just by looking at it “crossways.” But like always, the healer is the main focus of any attack, either obviously or not so. Healers can sit back, almost on the other end of the lane away from the fighting and heal allies but that invites them open to sneak attacks (Cloaked ships) or flanks and there’s not much he/she can do about it. They can either move up to the fighting so the bigger ships can protect him/her or they can jump away and hope that the fighting doesn’t get his teammates killed so they can come back and support after the danger has passed.

The humiliation or victory screen, depending on your outcome.

The “game changer” Gamma capture point is what everyone vies for. If your team captures this all your living team members get a buff across the board. Speed, damage, cooldowns, capture rate, everything gets better as long as you live. Once you die it’s gone and you’ll have to wait until Gamma comes back online to get that buff again. The first gamma gives you a general buff, not that big actually but still that can make the difference if the other team has higher level upgrades than you. The second gamma gives you a bigger buff but the third gives you the best of all. Not only does the third gamma give you a major buff, if gives you direct access to the enemy base from anywhere you are instead of having to capture the enemies forward base in order to get access to it from only that lane. But again once you die, the buff and enemy access is gone until the next gamma. Every Gamma buff from the third one on will always be that buff so even if your kicking ass everywhere else, don’t let the enemy team get that buff or your going to be sorry.
Attacking the enemy base is tricky, when you jump there and start capturing you start taking damage so the smaller ships need to stay out and let the big ones handle it. Unlike mines and forward bases which can be captured or neutralized, the main bases can be captured and interrupted but they can’t be reset. So a mine can be captured to 100%, then the enemy can set it to neutral and run, while the main bases can be captured to 25% and that will never drop. I’ve had games where we got the enemy base to 99%, they were playing defensively the entire time and the majority of us got killed off in the main assault on the base, then the enemy team captured the Gamma buff, jumped into our base before the majority of us could spawn back at base and the enemy team won.

But enough of the mechanics, is it good? Not gonna use any fancy words and just use a normal one: yes. It is a good game. One of the major problems of the Early Access portion of development was the fact that not enough people were playing so getting a game was a crap shoot. During the free weekend it jumped up to 3K/4K but the average player base past that point was give or take 300/400 people. Then it went Free to Play but still the player base stayed the same. But who knew the effect of just going out of Early Access would make it jump up to a minimum player base of 1,500 with it going only up (depending on the time of day.) Hopefully that will hold for a long time because this game is quite good but it just needs the player base high enough so you don’t have to sit around for 5+ minutes or longer to find a game.
Don’t get me wrong, the game is still a MOBA, so that means you’re gonna get assholes yelling at the team and calling you everything in the book. But since that applies to ALL modern games (cause you all are 13 year olds and you did there mom last night) theirs really no indication that there are more of these jerks in this game then anywhere else. I’ve encountered rage quitters who give up the second they die or yell at everyone being bad and not them and I’ve encountered good people that talk and help each other out and just blame bad things on bad luck, just like any other game. If you can get your friends to come play with you will obviously help win the game.

End of round all the stats you need and all the upvotes/downvotes you need.

If you’re looking to try out a MOBA that’s not entirely like a classic MOBA, here you go. If you like space and ships and ships in space going pewpew and going boom and such, here you go. If you want to try your hands at the Unreal 4 engine is also a good reason to play.
It is a fun game, give it a try. Like I said I thought I’d hate it because it was MOBA but turns out it doesn’t annoy me like the other MOBA’s out there and I do really enjoy it. Maybe it’s because of the ships and space and pewpew but I think it’s because I honestly really like that the games makes me feel I can do something and can handle whatever situation comes my way instead of needing the entire team to do anything productive. That is a very big clincher for me, and I’m glad I tried it out.