I’m a guy with a joystick, but there’s not much to do with it these days.

Jumpgate: Evolution is more than another spaceflight sim a la X-Wing or Wing Commander, though I’d be perfectly happy with a new one of those. It’s a massively-multiplayer space dogfighter, as far as I know, the first of its kind. If they can pull it off.

Massively multiplayer games are hard to do well. Even if you solve all the technical problems, with thousands of people playing at once, the systems of the game itself can spin out of control as participants poke and prod it in ways the developer never imagined.

It also remains to be seen if the game is an actual multiplayer action game or just a dolled up “kill ten rats and grind, grind, grind” MMO. EVE Online’s point and click gameplay didn’t do it for me.

Still, the first impressions from Kotaku are cautiously optimistic. The developer’s previous project, Auto Assault, was not well recieved. I saw a player review of it that summed it up as “Do you want to play a warrior car, a mage car or a thief car?”

If NetDevil can create something fun and original, I’ll be all over it. We’ll see.

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