Central Illinois - First Flight

I found out about Artemis via the Penny Arcade report and decided to give it a whirl. I have a group of friends that has been meeting weekly for tabletop RPGs for almost twenty years, and thought that Artemis would be a fun diversion for us.

We finally had a chance to try out the game with the group last night, and I can't say enough how much fun we had. I was grinning like an idiot the whole time, and I wasn't the only one.

We had five players, and doubled up the Science and Comms consoles so that we had four crew and a captain. The first captain through no fault of his lost twice (the helmsman twice ran into mines that wrecked the ship...mines that we dropped, btw). The third time was the charm, and we cleaned up the waves of enemy ships rather nicely. I had the Science and Communications consoles, and was always on my toes. We all felt kinda silly at first, but once we got into the game, "gamer mode" kicked on in our brains and the only thing mattered was surviving and winning. A couple times someone at the table addressed someone else with a "Sir" attached and we eventually all started addressing our friend as "Captain"; it was funny, but it felt natural and shows you how much it drew us in mentally.

We scrambled the positions around for the 4th game, and the previous helmsman took command. I took Engineering this time around. The new helmsman was a little lost as far as the direction and speed controls went, but eventually figured it out. I had a blast pushing the ship's systems to the max; I almost blew out the front shield and beam systems by accidentally letting them get overheated - I didn't feel the need to share that info with the captain or crew, lol.

We won that 4th game as well, but all the games were set to pretty low difficulty which we'll bump up the next time we meet. Everyone loved the game, it is the perfect game to play with a group. We also all agreed that beer would make the game much less stressful, so next time the Artemis is deployed, we'll make sure we have a full mini-fridge ready on the bridge.

Graphically the game looks ok; obviously there's better looking starship games out there but they weren't terrible either. Once you were in the game mentally, you ended up not caring a bit what it looked like and more on winning anyway. Next time we play I think I'm gonna try out a mod or two on it to improve the sounds a bit - we felt the weapons fire was rather wimpy sounding. The background music was really good for an indie game, though.

As a whole, the assessment of our group was pretty much "This is [bleeping] AWESOME!!!!!!!" It is worth every penny I paid for it, and we've found a new obsession. We're looking forward to the continual improvement of this game, and we can't wait to play it again.