Star Sonata

I decided to hop on the bandwagon and shamelessly advertise my favorite mmo.

So, where do I start? This game. Is. Fucking. Awesome.

You start in the Nexus, doing missions, destroying enemies in top-down good-ol fashion asteroids style combat.

Level 20, you make the brave step out of the Nexus, you enter a new, virgin land, full of players, AI, Star Systems, and more.

Move foward a bit, your probably level 50 or so, your destroying AI in deep space, and you come by a fellow player. You chat a bit, and he eventually invites you to his team. You agree to join.

You make friends with your teammates, they help you, you level up, you help them. You can build a station, complete Dungeon Galaxys, build stuff, create your own automatons, defend your territory, trade, create friends, create enemies.

This, is Star Sonata.

What IS Star Sonata, you ask?

Star Sonata is EVE plus Asteroids, you fly a ship through space on a 2-dimensonal plane, with arcade-style controls and full 3-d graphics and effects.

The universe is populated by both players and computer-controlled ships called AI. You can complete missions and destroy ai to level up, but be careful not to to pick fights you can't win...

Your abilities are controlled by 3 factors, your ship, your gear, and your skills. You can't move without a engine, you won't last a second without a shield, you can't power anything without a energybank. What gear(and ships) you can use is limited by your skills, and you can increase your skills with SP, and you gain SP by leveling up. You also can't fit a ton of massive stuff into a tiny ship, but you don't want to have a big ship and too much free because you'll be a big, slow, weak target.

Basic trade is possible between AI controlled stations, but the primary market is player driven. You can find stuff off the wrecks of AI and sell it to the highest bidder, or maybe a player owned station that you know is buying some.

This inadequate post doesn't even begun to describe the awesomeness that is Star Sonata. In fact, Im not going to try to describe it any further, my descriptions are unworthy of it's awesomeness. Instead, why don't you just try it.

Did I mention its freemium? You can play for as long as you want and as far as you want, but you can't attack things in the second-highest level area, and you can't enter the highest level area at all.

I see my inadequate description didn't pique anyone's interest, so why don't you take a look at some videos:

This video is kinda old, its out of beta now.

This one is even older still.

looks interesting, i might try it out.

Reminds me of a game called Space Rangers ... Unless you know Russian you can't rly play it as it's translation sucks (its a Russian game) but in it's Russian version it's so much fun . It's combat is turn based though .