I picked up LoP when it was released. It's a complete lemon. And not one with which you can squeeze some lemonade. It's broken. The UI is terrible. The key mapping is simply broken. The campaign/tutorial is a travesty. Combat is a waste of time. Graphics are junk. Don't buy it.
Let me go into detail:
It's Broken: Bugs are abundant and game-breaking. In my first three attempts, the game crashed twice before turn 20. I had to exit the game on my third attempt when the combat round refused to end, despite having combat set to automatically end after 4 minutes. Ships with repair modules have never actually repaired anything for me. Not once.
The UI sucks: Tool tips are hit-or-miss. Some buildings will display their stats (such as Factory: Costs so-and-so credits, produces so-and-so production points), while others have only vague descriptions (Advanced factory increases the industrial ouput of a planet). The empire management/economy page is very shy with any sort of actual breakdown of info. You get only the broadest idea of what's going on. Camera controls are worse than Sots, and you have to zoom waaaay in in order to click a wormhole or target a ship. Most annoyingly, to load a game, you have to go through all the menus to create a new game, then click the load game button. There's simply no option from the main menu.
Key mapping: Pressing shift (something you have to do when selecting multiple ships) randomly opens the steam overlay (which normally requires you to hold shift+tab). Before the steam hate-brigade jumps in, this is a problem of the game itself, and not steam or it's overlay. Furthermore, not all of the qwerty keys are properly mapped: when naming a ship, I discovered that "y" produces a "z." Since Kalyspo is a producer of Russian and/or Polish games, I assume LoP isn't natively English. But for something so damned simply, basic, and integral, there's simply no excuse.
The campaign/Tutorial is a travesty: I really don't even want to talk about it. Poor scripting and a few broken areas, all covered in something that can only loosely be described as writing and a story.
Combat: Oh, where to begin? On the up-side, you have manual control over your ships. On the down-side, everything else. Combat is slow, the UI interferes to the best of it's diabolic ability. Early encounters see your scout ship and an enemy scout ship endlessly circling each other, missing 98% of their shots on each other. In early one-on-one engagements, the two ships will literally circle for hours. You either have to sacrifice your ship, or send ships out in packs. While combat takes place in a separate "timed" round (the timer, as I noted earlier, doesn't work properly), it still takes place on the system map. If you happen to have ships spread out across the system, or have them all centrally located yet not immediately adjacent to the enemy ships, expect to watch them slowly close the distance over a course of minutes. All the while you're unable to do anything else. Just watch.
Graphically, the game is ugly, overly dark, and extremely unpolished.
Avoid it at all costs.
