I got a closed-beta key for Dreadnought yesterday, so naturally I had to check it out. I've been a fan of spaceship games for a long time and have played many, including EVE, Descent, Jumpgate, Star Citizen, and of course Fractured Space.

I'm posting this as a quick comparison between FS and Dreadnought based on my first impressions of Dreadnought yesterday for anyone on the fence between either game. Note that I've played FS since closed beta (about 1 year ago) so my review is biased in favor of FS. I won't cover every aspect of the games, just the ones I feel are important.

New Player Experience

Dreadnought's new player experience is very cinematic compared to FS and it's obvious that they spent at least some time with in-game cutscenes and voice acting, but these two things ultimately strike me as average. It reminded me a lot of Jumpgate's new player tutorial from 2002 and was a nice and quick 10-minute overview of how to control your ship's systems.

FS on the other hand focuses more on teaching core gameplay mechanics in its three tutorial missions. You can finish them in less than half an hour, but they cover important concepts that the player should improve on if they want to get better. There are zero cinematics, but the voice acting is a step above average.

Gameplay

I've spent far less time in Dreadnought than in FS, but I did get to try out all the ships in a match. Dreadnoughts and Destroyers feel like the slow, heavy-hitting ships they should be, and corvettes and cruisers feel like the fast support ships they should be. Each of the starter ships are unique and has unique weapons & subsystems, and the number of available subsystems for each ship exceeds that offered by FS. Despite the variety offered by Dreadnought's ship customization, its progression feels disjointed, with many items and ships being locked behind high ranks.

The controls however are what set the two games apart. In Fractured Space, you get a planar 4 degree-of-freedom flight model that allows ascending/descending, turning, and strafing. Dreadnought uses the same 4 DOF flight model, but does not have strafing. This makes controlling your ship awkward and frustrating as you turn your ship in various directions to position your ship against enemies, utilize cover (which is everywhere on many maps), and avoid bumping into your teammates.

Of the matches I played, it generally devolved into a slugfest of ships awkwardly orbiting and firing at each other, trying to destroy the enemy healer if they were in range. The HUD made it difficult to tell where enemies/friendlies were and what they were doing. There was rarely an opportunity to make tactical plays to outsmart or flank the other team.

Graphics

Fractured Space graphics are possibly some of the best I've seen for a space game of its scale. The ships have extremely high part and poly count (which is part of the reason for the notorious freezes when players join a lobby), and the backdrop on the maps is very atmospheric. While there is still room for optimization, FS's graphics and ship designs are head and shoulders above most space games I've played in recent memory.

Dreadnought's graphics are lackluster by comparison. Even on 'Epic' (the highest) graphics settings, it's immediately obvious that ship textures have a low poly count. Not only that, but textures don't seem to make use of ambient occlusion, making the textures look dull and boring due to the lack of proper lighting effects. Ship designs don't have many parts like FS ships, and while this may have been an intentional design decision, the result is that Dreadnought's ships often look like flying misshapen potatoes.

tl;dr Fractured Space is better, and while it's going through some growing pains right now, at its core it is a much better game in terms of gameplay, graphics, and overall fun experience than Dreadnought.