Gates of Horizon

Its not bad , at first i didnt have a clue what i was doing , and i was scratching my head. There are some helpful people playing this game to help you get on your way.

Gates of Horizon is not a game were you have to micro manage what you do. You get 1 agent per skill level. and you can give that agen different commands, to mine for you or go hunting, This agent will do this as long as you have storage room in the station that your in. so you can let him go come back the next day and collect what he has mined for you.

Its a neat concept.

So yea i do recommend to check it out.

I really want to like this game but, in the current state, I can't. As many others have said, this game is all about grinding. A lot. And some more. I wouldn't mind to grind for experience and money if there were many different ways to do so but at the moment there are just a few options and after a week doing that, it just a chore, not a pleasure to play this game. There is a dire need of more content.

Add that the AI and controls are not good... pilot would auto-hunt to their demise, there's no threshold setting to play around to ensure they flee back to base on time. Even more, once engaged in combat, they keep fighting no matter what, even after you order them to fly back to base (they completely ignore the order).
So yeah... I'm going to uninstall it and hope that a year or two from now it will be better.

Still, my respect and kudos for making a SteamOS executable. That makes me happy to have paid for this game despite it not being something good yet at this stage of development.

Probably one of the most chill games I've ever played. Seriously, micro-manage the $|-|1T out of your fleet, each ship, resources, etc. Has a bit of a learning curve, and the UI kinda sucks at the beginning but is alright once you get used to it (might take an hour or two).

Graphics aren't the best but if you get it while it's on sale they're just fine, plus this game will work on just about any system (and you can even play it on your android tablet/smartphone with the app once you own it here).

Overall, pretty dang decent! 7/10

The game is worth ten dollars, especially seeing as how it doesn't have any microtransactions.

When you first start playing the game you might be disappointed because the interface appears to be very basic, but as you gain experience points and gain new agents (individual characters that you can hire each time you level and can fly independently or in a fleet) you will begin to see more depth in the game.

There are three factions and three ship classes - scout, cruiser, battleship. Each faction only offers two ships for each class, but some of the ships do have some cool equipment slots and you can 'mount' agents to a equipment module so it's recommended to look at the Community Hub for a player guide so you can specialize your agents' attributes for fighting, trading, crafting or mining.

I think I have seen up to 20 active players at a time, but players don't really interact with each other much. One of the pitfalls of this game is that there's not much to do outside of grinding levels and experience for new agents. Players can join groups known as 'holdings' and it's basically a guild system where you can own starbases and customize them. I think you can even get ore from planets in your zone of control. But there's not really that much to do with other players so it's kind of a singleplayer experience...

The crafting isn't really deep enough to make you want to do it, though it is more effective to craft your items than it is to buy them.

Game might get better, but you could easily squeeze 100 hours or more out of this game so it's worth ten bucks even if it never recieves any other updates. You should buy it.

After 2000 hours in star Conflict I was burned out on that game and was looking for an alternative. GoH seemed like a possibility.

But:

- Micromanagement
- Indirect Ship Control
- Sub-par Graphics and graphical effects

You don't directly fly/control your ship, as in most other space combat game, you just tell it what to do, just like in Eve (or maybe, to a lesser extend, Starpoint Gemini 2).

Thing is: if you don't like Eve, you wouldn't like this either. If you like Eve, why would you consider playing GoH instead? And the player base seems to reflect that. 15 players on in 24h? This indicates that this game is dead.

If you are looking for a space combat game, where you control your ship yourself in combat (like Wing Commander, Freelancer, etc.) you won't like this. If you want just pure Space Combat, Star Conflict may be more your thing, and if you want Trade etc. mixed in, possibly Elite:Dangerous.

What I liked: the tutorial seems pretty good, without it you'd be completely lost.

I really like this game.

For a beginner the game could be difficult to understand and it explains some of the negative reviews but I definitely recommend to have some patience and play a couple of hours to get into the game and appreciate it.

In few words, you manage a space corporation with different agents and spaceships and you are completely free to do whatever you want: exploring star systems, mining asteroids, trading resources and fighting aliens or other players... and so on.

Developers are doing a great work. They are improving the game month by month (and even more often) and they are ready to personally respond to players problems or requests.

I really enjoy the gameplay and the micromanaging and the complexity of the strategies that can be implemented. You can choose a lot of details and completely customize each agent and spaceship (with an incredibly large skills tree and a huge amount of spaceship components sets).

At the end, it is definitely a more complex game than it seems at the first peak. Funny and very promising.

Fun game. Playing it with a few friends. It would be frustrating without friends to play with or someone to help you rebuild equipment when you die as you learn how much firepower and defensive recovery you need to kill certain enemies and lose ships in the process through trial and error. Some people seem pretty friendly and helpful in the chat. I enjoy automining. It lets me be productive, gain experience, and hoard ore while I'm doing something else or am offline and away from keyboard completely. Can't wait until they implement autohunting. I just wish there were more players to interact with.

Ah so about the game. Basically it's an RPG real time strategy game.
You are the Corporation. You start at level 1 leadership. Leadership level is your 'main level'.
You then get 1 agent from the start and you go and do tasks that accumulate experience. There are 4 skill trees of experience.

Crafting- Trading- Resource- and Warfare.
Doing crafting tasks gets you craft exp which I think it's about 10% of it goes towards Leadership exp, and then you use your crafting exp to level up the crafting skills you want. Same goes for trading tasks, mining and refining tasks, and combat tasks. All of them raise towards Leadership exp but at a small fraction. Get enough exp for a leadership level up and then you can hire another agent. This means now you can fly 2 ships! You'll hit this point like 5-20mins within starting the game if you follow the tutorial guidelines. You can 'fleet' them together so that they attack the same target and stick together.

What's really unique and cool about this game is exactly that, the fleets and multiple ship ownership.
Fleets are also 'parties' as you know from other MMO RPGs. Your ships share experience in a fleet. The ships with the most Skill Points from Agents [and I think the more advanced ones hold weighter exp-extract power too than say an equal amount of SP of standard skills] pull in the most experience and then splits that amongst the agents on that ship even further.

You can form a guild, in this game it's called a Holding. I'm in one called The Death Penalty with a few of my friends.
We're training up quite nicely. The leader can command 2 battleships. So far I can only command a Cruiser and 2 scouts.
And while there are some very nice people, there are some smug bullies too that pretend to be your friend or friendly.
Try not to let them drive you off the game. I hear a few groups like that have driven off a hundred plus new and intermediate players. There are a lot of constructive things you can do for leveling up and bettering your economy and skills while not entering into Red space where you can be hunted down.

7.8/10, would be higher rating if there were like a minimum of 10x more systems and players. There's only like 60 systems and like 30 active players per week?
I'm still new but my couple friends who have played about 2 months now say it's been like this since they've started.
I don't know what gives, more players get in here lol.
:-)

A refreshing MMO space simulation experience after EVE/Perpetuum.

Pros:
- good community
- enlightening interface
- devs adding content
- simple yet lovely graphics

Cons:
- buggy chat
- sound

Gates of Horizon is absolutely worth buying... if you like this type of game.
The interface is a little bit tricky at the beginning but after a few hours you'll get used to it.

A lot of people over here are complaining about the grafics... well the graphics are farcry4 like for sure but I don't think this is a contra as you can play it on every device possible (Pc or table or even phone).

Btw the community is very cool, I played like about 1 hour, got invited to a group and got a nice little ship worth aroun 1500000 $ ... :D

Edit 7/14/2016: This game is dead. There have been no patches released in five months. No more than ten simultaneous logins per month last I checked, probably around 5 now. Since I wrote my original review they added some high-end PVE content and automated pretty much all PVE content, which officially made this game a login-and-minimize MMO. So far as I know the staff has all left the company and the game is up on Steam for the purposes of generating a few bucks a month for the creator.

Original post:

A lot of people will jump into this game thinking it's something like EVE Online, but with a one-time payment instead of a subscription fee (like Perpetuum but cheaper and actually space-based). And initially, it feels much the same: You undock your ship and do things in space like shoot rocks and pirates.

The similarities end there, however. Understandably, as a very early MMO, there's a lot to be improved upon and mechanics that don't exactly work yet. PVP is trash as there's neither aggression mechanics nor warp disruption, so catching somebody who either doesn't want to fight or wants to fight until it's clear that they're losing is impossible. I've exploded at least a hundred ships in this game, and all of them were AFK or butterfingering their warp button.

I understand that a small sandbox MMO doesn't need to have the same PVP mechanics as one of the largest, and GoH is doing a lot of things right (for example, you control a fleet of 1-7 ships instead of a single ship, which is a fun deviation from typical MMO design). The main reason why I have to give this game a No recommendation, from the perspective of somebody who is primarily motivated by PVP, is that the Dev team simply refuses to answer questions about when or how they plan to make PVP feasible. They are available around the clock, answering questions related to PVE topics, but when a PVP topic comes up, they are mute.

This lack of transparency is disturbing.

Further, those who do PVP are treated with scorn by the overwhelmingly larger PVE community, who will chant "Go back to EVE" at any suggestion that the current PVP mechanics might be added or improved. At first I thought it was funny, being an EVE veteran, and had heard much of the same whining from the EVE playerbase. The difference here is that the "powers that be" - the few players who already own Battleships, which are a hard-counter to literally everything in the game - are themselves strongly against the improvement or addition of PVP features.

So it could be that you're looking for a game in which you mine, build, mine, build, mine, and build some more, and don't do much else. Gates of Horizon would be your game. If you are looking for a game with decent space combat, you're out of luck, and probably will be for the near, if not distant, future.

This game just simply isn't there yet to make it worth playing. The ship mechanics and build strategies are extremely simplistic, the different faction ships are carbon copies mechanically with only cosmetic differences and there is simply not enough to do to make this even a sandbox.

The only reason why I put in for this was the concept of operating multiple ship crew/ships on a single account as a gameplay feature. Unfortunately this great idea is completely overshadowed by the game simply not being worth the time to play it yet.

A lot of people compare this to that Darwinian experience, EvE Online. If you want to play space battleship simulator (and don't mind paying a sub to do it) that is the place to do it. Gates of Horizon is not worth your time just yet.

It's still early access. Had to reset corporation to get through tutorial.

To devs: try something else then blocking all UI to tell player what the guck you want.

Most important first, this game is fun to play!

At the first glance, the game might seem simple, but it really is not. This does not mean that the game is hard to play, but that it is very diverse. You can play multiple roles, and since you are managing a whole corporation with many agents, you don’t have to limit yourself to just one.

You automatically gain experience in those areas you play. If you mine, you get experiences in mining, if you craft you get experiences in crafting and if you fight you get experiences for fighting…
This system of leveling, combined with playing multiple agents at the same time, gives you the opportunity to switch between different types of gameplay.

The game is still heavily developed, in an agile type of process. All basic features have already been implemented and are of good software quality. New releases with new features are released several times a month! The support is very active, personally responding within hours, and really trying to help you with your individual problem and not putting you off with a prepared statement. Often you will find developers in the common chat channel, ready for discussions with you.

So to sum it up, for a small amount of money you get a very good game, which might not be 100% feature complete, but is constantly improved and ready to play.

WARNING! IT'S AN EARLY ACCESS GAME!
Don't be fooled - this game is in ALPHA. Means early development phase with lots of features missing and lots of bugs.

At first glance it looks very attractive. It looks simple enough. First achievements are rewarding and pretty fast to get. It only becomes obvious that this game is shallow and empty when you try to delve deeper. Suddenly you realize that you can't use better ships and components even if you can afford them. You can't craft anything decent yourself without putting couple of weeks effort into grind.

And most of the time you will spend grinding. Grind, grind, grind. You'll waste huge amounts of time developing skills of your agents only to relize that you've done it wrong. Every new agent will become a pain in the bottom instead of a reward.

User interface is awful. It makes you feel like a cripple when trying to manage more than one agent. Combat control interface is so limited you can't even designate roles for ships in your fleet. Switching between your ships is very slow and requires several clicks.

PvP is non-existant. Everyone can escape a battle with a double-click. The only chance is jumping in on a single ship which is just out of a gate and it will take some time for him to accelerate or ganking AFKs.

The gap between high level players and low level players is tremendous. And there is no any migration mechanism for high levels. You all boil in a single and very small pot. Universe is very small. Occasionally you'll be ganked by high levels (just out of boredom), occasionally high levels will wipe all asteroids right in front of you in a matter of seconds.

Everything in this game is raw and undeveloped. Give it a year than come back.

This game is really quite good once you master the U.I, it's way of thinking and the few bugs in it,
A lot like e.v.e in basic terms of gameplay, worth checking you tube for game play to see if it's your cup of tea.
ive not sampled the combat in enough detail yet but the mining,crafting and buy/selling part and the agent leveling system & skill trees are very enjoyable.
the community are helpfull and so are the Devs.
Very addictive
high hopes for this one.
stratergy/mmo/resource building/x3

Rating 78% so far

I've been playing GoH for the last day or so, and thought I'd compile my thoughts for anyone considering dropping a tenner on this little game.

Let's start with the cons, I always want to know the bad thing about a game first so they don't surprise me.

CONS:

-Graphics: Not a lot to say here. The graphics are VERY simplistic. The nature of the game and the ease of projecting starfields sort of makes up for this. Personally, I don't find it a bother, but it's worth noting.

-GUI: The GUI has some definite weaknesses. For instance, the chatbox is tiny, only shows a few messages at a time, and automatically fades out. This renders meaningful communication difficult at best. If I had one priority target for the developer, it would be the chatbox and community interaction UI. NOTE: there IS a full-screen chat option that works well but... it's full screen. Tough to play AND chat.

-Sound effects: This one stood out to me. The music is all pretty good, but then I fired a laser at someone and thought I had just cruised into a disco. PEW PEW PEW go the beams in one of the cheapest sci-fi sound effects I've heard in some time. Oh well, turn the SFX volume down until they get updated. Minor problem.

-Missions: There aren't really any that I've found. The game expects you to head off into space and start making your way with comparatively little direction. While I enjoy the "make your own story" approach to gameplay, a LITTLE bit of handholding as far as where to get blueprints, how to explore, where to look for new ships would have been nice.

-Beginning: In the beginning you have one ship and one agent. The game is fairly boring as you let him auto-combat or auto-mine everything, watching him orbit. Once you unlock a second agent/ship, the game starts to open up more, but the first hour or so is definitely underwhelming.

-Explanation: How does giving ships orders work? Why is the "patrol" option greyed out? Why can't I order a ship to auto harvest without micromanaging? All of these are answers new players could use.

Whew... still with me? It's time to talk about the good stuff:

-Concept: I LOVE the concept of this game. Rather that playing a single pilot who flies around, you are a "corporation". You hire agents, select their abilities, send them on missions, level them up, change their loadouts, etc. It plays more like an RTS than any sort of simulator, so don't expect careful maneuvering.

-Depth of skill trees: There are enough skills with tangible benefits that leveling up your agents becomes quite involved. You want to plan which agent will specialize where and make sure he is getting the right sort of experience. Agents can both pilot ships and man guns or other modules on board ships piloted by other agents so... do you want three light ships, or one big ship with a gunner and a shield operator? This is where the game really shows its potential.

-Community Quality: The chat may not be the best, but those pilots out there that ARE chatting are extremely helpful if you just ask. Many of the game's shortcomings as far as GUI and explanation have been answered for me almost immediately using in-system chat.

-Potential: I know, saying "It COULD be so much!" sounds like wishful thinking, and maybe it is, but this game has IMMENSE potential if you look at it as a sort of "starter version".

BOTTOM LINE:

At $10, Gates of Horizon is worth every single penny.

It's not without it's flaws, but virtually all of those are easily fixed, and the fundamental core of the game works... if not beautifully, at least compellingly.

Today I'm bouncing back and forth between GoH and Elite:Dangerous to get both my command AND my pilot fix.

Initital thoughts:

Ok. This is my opinion of the game as of this very early stage.

Pro:

No sub fees
Fleets of ships on one account.

Cons:

Poorly balanced.
Horrible sound / depth of music
Horrible UI.
Nearly impossible to actually play the game and participate in chat.


The closest existing game is Eve Online. With that said, you figure that they would have gotten a 3 month sub to Eve and discovered what works and, more importantly, what doesn't work in a space MMO. Over a decade of live and learn in Eve Online, and they have foolishly ignored those lessons and are repeating the EXACT SAME problems that CCP is trying like hell to work their way out of right now.

The music is VERY repetitive and the SFX are Casio... I shut both of them off in the first 5 hours just to save my sanity.

There are numerous areas where the mechanics do nothing to drive the game. There seems to be lots of grind just for the sake of grinding.

The UI does nothing to improve the sense of community in the game. Which is bad, because the community is the only content the game currently has other than mining or shooting NPCs.

I have 70+ hours in it and I could (barely) fly the middle tier of ships. Bear in mind that it would be horribly slow, but I could take a cruiser somewhere.

I see potential, but there is a lot of work to be done before that is realized. I'm bored already, which means that I'll probably go back to another game in the library. This will removed a bit of content from the game. I have serious doubts about the long term viability of this game unless they make some quick and effective improvements in the UI, leveling / balance mechanics and other items.

The Dev team should sit down and do a marathon session of Extra Credits and then take a look at what they have crafted.

I'd love to love Gates of Horizon, but it just isn't there. (Sadly)

Edit: 1/3/2015 2110hrs. Yep. Logged in and looked at the fleet of ships and just couldn't bring myself undock and grind mining so I could grind refining or grind NPCs...

GoH uses type dependant XP. So, you earn XP of a certain type by doing that activity. Trading stuff gets you trading XP. Making items gets you crafting XP. Resource gatherng and refining get you resource XP. COmbat gets you warfare XP.

There is one (1) skill to to spend trading XP on. Three to spend Resource XP on. Like 5 to spend crafting XP on and a whopping 7 or 8 to spend combat XP on.

In order to fly a cruiser, the mechanics of the game dictatat that I have Piloting LVL 10. Which means I would have to grind another ~80k of skill points that I can only gain in combat missions and only at 100 ponts at a time. Bear in mind that the fleet commands can go wonky, and if that happens your ship(s) die. Quickly. Since combat grinding doesn't net any considerable amount of money, if a ship dies, you have to go mining to earn the $ to buy another combat hull.

To add to the fustration, the piloting aspect of the game mechanics in mining are the EXACT same as the piloting mechanics of combat in the game. Orbit a rock and shoot mining lasers at it until it pops / the cargo holds are full or orbit a NPC and shoot combat lasers at it until it pops / you blow up. The former nets you NO improvement to your piloting skill. The latter nets you MINIMAL improvement to your combat skills, of which the piloting skill is one of like 8 skills that require combat XP points.

End result for today after logging into GoH. I just can't do it tonight. I'd rather clean up gecko crap than grind more rocks or slowly warp between combat grinds.

So, for tonight at least, gecko $h!t wins over GoH... I can't wait for an update.

I was playing to Eve Online 5 days ago, and I didnt like too much, even I already uninstalled it. But finally I have found a fun space MMORPG game with no montly fees, where you can trade/combat/mining, and you can have various agents to do whatever you want, so you arent limited to only one character. I only have played a few hours and I find it very fun and addictive game. And this game was released a few days ago, so Its very nice start playing to a game since beginning

Im editing it, because game looks dead now, no more updates in almost a year.

I've played almost 8 hours so far and this game is very cool.
If you like spaceships, space, level ups, having multiple spaceships at the same time formed up together, and a friendly helpful community of people in game-- then this game is for you! There's some bugs here and there I've heard people talk about and one happened to me where I've been stuck but they'll get you out of it just write to the developers and wait a few hours if even that. It'l get better. 9.4/10 for me. And like someone in the game I saw said, this game isn't exactly for instant-gratification people. It's for people with strategy, focus, and people who like to chill and explore and work on their ship and make connections with people and go from there to get into some real good epic action. Sorry if this wasn't the most eloquent review but I think it's worth throwing in there. You play it yourself or research it more if you want to get better idea of what it's about.

// Update 8/30/2015, 9 months later after writing this review //

I've taken a few breaks from this game here and there, but always come back to it and get immersed again. It's the best spent $10 on a game I've ever spent.
In-game my corp name is Knight Of Zero.

We need more players but it's not a complete desert, and there are events and things to do. There's a consistent dozen or so of us at minimum every week all year so far. I mostly play on the .exe client and not through steam, so my real hours played is way higher than this. Probably in the thousands of hours. There's at least a few people that know most all the ins and outs of this game that will answer any questions you have about it in-game, me being one of them.

This game is more complex than it appears, and while the graphics might look minimal it seems to have a level of customization and depth that require time to master. Definitely not a casual game, with more in common with a roguelike than, let's say, Eve online or Starcraft.

I tried the beta having fun with my friends and voted for it once it reached Greenlight and now I hope it reaches critical mass to express its potential.

I see some negative reviews and I understand this game might be not for everyone, but I feel like recommending it to everyone that loves to micromanage and has fond memories of games like Syndicate.