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#4357441 - 05/15/17 01:36 PM Hellion, best space game i have played in a long time. Mini review.  
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So your a colonist who has been in cryo sleep for a hundred years on a journey to a distant star, Hellion. Of course, everything has gone pear shaped and you awake to a ruined attempted colony and have to survive a persistent space world. You start in a cryo chamber in a module from the colony, needing to power it up, get suited up and start venturing outside. At the moment it is basically a learning sandbox but does have pvp servers and you can coop, yes! Fresh start puts you a long way from anyone else who does happen to be on the server which is nice, no griefing. From there you can save your char by going back into cryo and choosing resume when next firing it up, if you exit game anywhere else you will oxygen starve as your char stays on the server fulltime. Cryo leaves you safe from death and other players. The initial learning curve of the game is a mildly steep, the main problem i found was setting my keys up comfortably, once you find your sweet spot space jaunts are a breeze and hell fun!

The biggest issue with my key settings is i play arrows, not wasd, always have, so i set arrows for left, right, forward, back and home,end, del and page down for my left/right rotate and up down. Once i had them sorted the space walks were a joy. Wasd, space, c and q,e felt terrible for my game play style. Mouse is the usual move your char with a right click zoom, i set my action and gear key to the mouse side buttons. I absolutely hate chasing the keyboard for basic keys that you use a lot in games.To most flight simmers the game should be second nature, it's like flying a helicopter, in space, with a couple of minutes of oxygen biggrin Graphics are very nice although the planets could use some work but i am using an older rig so might be missing out a bit on the fancier stuff. So lets have a look...



Awakening from cryo sleep..to my most definitely weird looking partner. 100 years of sleep has changed her and i am pretty sure she is sleeping in her own chamber from now on.


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Her view of me spawning in, hmmm, definitely going to be a sausage fest out here in space.

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There is tablets laying around that give you some tips on what to do, collect suit, reactivate power etc.

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One of our accidental early spawns into someone elses ship. The items laying around are collected pieces that get your air and power up and running. Green good, orange medium, red bad. You simply replace the bad stuff on the ships with the good stuff and then use the different hardware displays to activate the modules. After your first couple of spawns getting your first modules powered up and pumping fresh air takes under a minute or so.


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Suited up and ready to hit the outdoors! i can't wait until she closes that damn visor..

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Gravity free in the dock entrance

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Outer door opened, here you have to have a key bound for grabbing/holding on so you are not launched into space when the door opens. Right shift works a treat for my arrows layout. Jetpack needs to be activated here as well.

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Her being overly cautious before she takes her first floating steps into the wild black yonder. There is a key once outside to activate tracking and select objects in the visor which is easy to navigate and set.


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One small leap for womankind!

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I told her to be very careful with jetpack inputs..a little is a lot, try to stay near me and abuse your shift key. Once spaceborne the grab/hold key settles all movement excepting forward/back so you can halt rotational movement and get a bearing. She unfortunately sped out into doing 360's in every direction space until she disappeared into the blackness. It was rather unsettling to see her become a dot and then nothing.

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I decided to flip my helmet and join her so we could respawn afresh as we didn't have another suit in our module.

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Our next start we made it out of the airlock but for unknown reasons she decided to take her helmet off whilst in the gear tab, it didn't end well as her head appeared to freeze.

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Last edited by Ajay; 05/15/17 02:47 PM.

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#4357451 - 05/15/17 02:10 PM Re: Hellion, best space game i have played in a long time. Mini review. [Re: Ajay]  
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Jaunt three.


We made it to a close by ship after much 360ing and panicked radio chatter.

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Somehow she managed to grab the ship with her head and refused to move until i opened the airlock. The helmet light is nifty.

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Depressurising the airlock

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Heading in

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Repressurising, the sounds that slowly come on in the airlock are cool


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Once in a gravity environment, the cargo dock, she becomes all confident again and starts sprinting around like a lunatic. I think space, and probably the face stubble, is affecting her.

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The cockpit, i should have grabbed some more pics here because it is a cool bit of kit with a full 3d nav screen where you can set warp coords, identify objects, scan out to 1000 miles or use the rcs maneuvering to jet to close by objects and dock with them. This once again a mild learning curve until you get comfortable. Docking can be frustrating until the penny drops and you just 'get it'. I managed to finally dock on my tenth attempt, slower is faster. Youtube vids help as well wink You need to select the object you are docking with via the dock hud then select grapple with the pincers at the front of the ship or the airdock port on top. The modules dock doors you are docking with also have to be closed, which i discovered after my first two failed attempts. Being the right way up helps as well, attempt three through five. Coming in slow is key..attempt six through eight and cracking the sh/ts and ramming the module at full tilt will only end up with it disappearing into the blackness..attempt nine. Attempt ten, my my first dock, had my daughter jump and shout what the hell Dad!! as i screamed 'YOUR GODDAMN RIGHT WE DOCKED !!' at the screen. It's a great gaming moment smile


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Slowly..so slowly

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Docking takes over at the last second if you are all locked in and slides the airlocks together. I haven't been this satisfied in a game in a long time.

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I had to get outside and see my handiwork and exited via the cargo bay.

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#4357453 - 05/15/17 02:21 PM Re: Hellion, best space game i have played in a long time. Mini review. [Re: Ajay]  
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Great stuff Ajay. I've been watching this for a while waiting to jump in. Is there enough to do now?


EV's are the Devils matchbox.
#4357459 - 05/15/17 02:44 PM Re: Hellion, best space game i have played in a long time. Mini review. [Re: Ajay]  
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This was my second dock with an airlock docked to the starter module and then docked the airlock to the ship.

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Repressurising the cargo bay.

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After docking for a decent session and getting it down pat i tried out the grapple, same interface, good fun.

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With docking down it's move onto warp travel, i'll post some pics of the nav interface after my next session, it's an intuitive and nice setup. This is right before the jump after i have selected an asteroid orbiting our close by planet.


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Punch it Chewie!

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The warp graphics and the thrum along with the slight ship movement actually made me feel a bit weird, sort of like when you can nearly see one of those 3d dot pictures but are just not quite grasping it, strange sensation. Very cool effect in game.


Coming out of warp.


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587 metres from the asteroid i plotted on the nav hud.

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Said asteroid. For some reason the ship had no mining 'space' drills on board. You mine nitrogen, heavy ice and other elements that you farm in a container attached to the drill. In the cargo port there is a cargo interface that allows you to either refine the product or simply store it. You then use this to refill the ships various needs as well as top up your jetpacks. You can also swap fuel and rcs across from attached modules to the mother ship, once again all very easy to do.

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The asteroid ended up being a lot bigger than i thought as i got closer and is an eerie thing.

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A 'derelict' module i warped to after the asteroid. These bits of space junk have items you can use, jetpacks, guns, ammo and ship parts. Plenty of stuff orbiting around the planets.


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The ship, cool bit of kit.


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Couple of random shots.



Partner getting gunned up.


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A dead guy we found on a server, looks like he died from lack of oxygen right as he was nearly home free.

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Overall, cool, very cool game. Great physics, looks great and is nicely optimised. I am running a 7year old Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H board with 4gb of no name DDR3 ram, a first gen i5 661, GTX760 4gb and Win10 64 (FINALLY!) on a Samsung 256gb ssd and the game runs near flawlessly even in this very early access stage. I did get some spikes when really close to my partner and operating the airlocks whereas she didn't. Her extra 4g of ram may be the difference. 25 bucks was easy to fork out once i watched a few vids. Not a ton of content yet but enough (for me) to dive in and get a feel of the mechanics. I've got 22 hours up and can see double that easy just getting completely comfortable with how it all works before i even consider moving onto servers with more players. If you like space sims keep an eye on it, very interesting game smile


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#4357462 - 05/15/17 02:59 PM Re: Hellion, best space game i have played in a long time. Mini review. [Re: Chucky]  
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Originally Posted by Chucky
Great stuff Ajay. I've been watching this for a while waiting to jump in. Is there enough to do now?


For me yes smile It's nice to do something that isn't simply killing peeps and looking at online stats. Very peaceful good looking game with some great moments, coop is wicked. There is a bigger jet pack and suit kit (eva) that gives you more than double the space walk time but i have only found a complete kit twice so far. Even with the smaller pack you can make a 2k jaunt to other objects..and hope there is a spare jet pack onboard so you can swap out, some nail biting involved. There is a great dude on the tube called sausagefingers The bloody pommiest guy i have ever heard who has a series on Hellion. Well worth the watch..he's a funny bastid and sounds more English than England biggrin If you can't get at least 30 hours out of it as it is at the moment i would be surprised, nice to get on the curve before it gets bigger as well. I haven't tried the mining side of it yet which will add another side of it to the game. On some of the bigger servers people have made some massive colonies, rather daunting stuff. Cheers Chucksta!


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#4357649 - 05/16/17 02:03 PM Re: Hellion, best space game i have played in a long time. Mini review. [Re: Ajay]  
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Couple more pics that show some of the systems in Hellion.



The initial tablet you pick up when exiting the cryo

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Cargo interaction panel for refilling your backpack, simple drag and drop.

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Power supply interface which will show if components are installed or missing.

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Radial gear tab once you are suited up, without a suit you can only carry a single item in hand.


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Pew pew.

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Space drills! Battery packs to the left.

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With a canister attached and the battery on the screen shows we have not collected any resources so our next move is to get to an asteroid.

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Get the warp drive up and running with a singularity cell detonator, pretty sure i was asleep in that class..



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Move up to flight and power up the FTL (Faster Than Light) warp drive..another class i may have slept through.

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#4357653 - 05/16/17 02:20 PM Re: Hellion, best space game i have played in a long time. Mini review. [Re: Ajay]  
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Bring up the nav panel which can be zoomed in and out and rotated every which way. It shows your orbit (Home) and then the system you are in (Zoom to parent). Scan picks up more objects in the area like asteroids and other stations and debris. This time it also showed three distress signals which are activated by players, i can then warp there and either give help or kill them and knock off their gear. Chat is global which is cool.

[img]http://imgur.com/gallery/7cE9E[/img]

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Here you can see after the san we have picked up a few more objects in orbit.


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Selecting an object, an asteroid here, and then right clicking gives you a 'Warp To' option and then a bit of dragging of your initial or arrival point will give you an FTL Ready option meaning we are good to go for a jump. You also need to select one of your warp drive cells (lower right) to get the FTL ready option.

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Then it is simply click the Initialise option and we get this screen...

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Back out of Nav and align our ship with the aiming point via the rcs, flying the ship in this mode is the same as using your suit, and await the countdown.

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Activate seconds before the jump or we go nowhere and miss our window..

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..and away we go!

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#4357657 - 05/16/17 02:35 PM Re: Hellion, best space game i have played in a long time. Mini review. [Re: Ajay]  
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The warp takes a couple of minutes so i do i quick check of all of the ship systems making sure everything is on and good and recheck my drill to make sure i am good to go. Head back up just as the jump ends. Rotate the ship so i can exit the airlock facing the asteroid and head out, space mining baby!

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Time to crank that drill, this is the first time i have mined so it was pretty cool and very simple. Point drill into asteroid, drill.

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Canister is full after about a minute, time to get back to the ship.

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Remove the canister and see what we have got.

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Heavy Ice. Sounds like a space drug deal. Drag and drop the HI to the raw section and you can see with refining what it breaks down to, refining is instant.

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You would need to be a few players to get a decent haul but you can take two canisters at a time with you, parking closer to the asteroid and using an open cargo bay would also speed up the process. I jetted out a fair distance from the ship to get a size comparison with the asteroid, decent sized rock!

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There was no way i was making it back with my limited oxygen so off went the jetpack..another lonely space death biggrin


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#4357732 - 05/16/17 09:49 PM Re: Hellion, best space game i have played in a long time. Mini review. [Re: Ajay]  
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You're making it extremely difficult for me to hold off on this for much longer Ajay,please stop! biggrin


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#4357779 - 05/17/17 07:39 AM Re: Hellion, best space game i have played in a long time. Mini review. [Re: Ajay]  
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Lol, i couldn't hold out after watching Masters vid ! At the moment i am warping around looking for some PvP action, space piracy sounds fun biggrin


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#4358329 - 05/19/17 10:51 PM Re: Hellion, best space game i have played in a long time. Mini review. [Re: Ajay]  
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Omg. You can set your own orbits and go visiting other planets!

The orbit i set in the nav panel, this is after i had already arrived, my ship is the triangle in orbit. Setting one can be a bit tricky owing to distance, angle of arrival and other objects in the way.

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The last second of a warp arriving at another dead looking rock.

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Going looking for some space action at a Station. Knock knock!

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Unfortunately nobody was home.


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