What the Zig?

What I find most interesting about Zigfrak is that, although it is a pretty fundamentally different kind of game from Drox Operative, I've become disinterested in it for some of the same reasons: menu-information overload, and oversimplified-yet-awkward combat.

To its credit, Zigfrak does a legitimately impressive job of keeping its controls simple -- not just in piloting the ship, but in docking with other spacecraft, jumping around the map, using mission items, and collecting pickups. It's clear that the developer has prioritized ease-of-control, and the gameplay is fairly accessible as a result. But at the same time, this streamlining isn't uniformly distributed throughout the game; finding my way through the menus, and examining and applying options - when they weren't automatically selected for me - was unexpectedly laborious. I never did figure out how to equip new weapons, or if there was any deeper inventory management that I needed to be doing.

Somewhat tragically, the game's simplified piloting and combat controls actually felt like a drawback once enemy ships started to show up. Compared to my recent (and very pleasant) experience with Strike Suit Zero, Zigfrak's shallow movement and braindead weapon systems felt vacant and unsatisfying. Watching ships and space debris whip around, and witnessing cavalcades of missile explosions, is at least visually interesting; but it just isn't very deep.

Zigfrak does get its game script right: the tutorial is clear without being too meticulous, and working through follow-up missions is super-easy. And it didn't take long at all for me to be thrown into some deep-space alien drama stuff, such that I'm relatively confident that Zigfrak's plot has some real meat in it. But, I'm not really interested in tolerating the overwhelming menus and dull gameplay enough to get any farther in it.