The setting is a distant galaxy, a few thousand years from now. The game's novel combat system requires you to overcome a bit of a learning curve to become proficient, but it does a good job of making battles feel tactically dynamic. Missiles are deliberately weaker threats than they typically are in space sims, which forces you to rely primarily upon energy weapons and your own aiming abilities.
Disabling flight assistance also allows you to maneuver backward, which, combined with the need to make frequent use of the strafing keys, makes combat almost feel like you're playing a first-person shooter instead of a flight sim. You can use a flight-assisted flight model that always moves your ship in the direction it's facing, or you can turn off that assistance in order to retain momentum and move and fire in different directions. Joystick support is included, but a keyboard/mouse combo is also effective. The most effective evasive tactics are actually side-strafing and rolling rather than turning. Fights don't feel like traditional dogfights where you maneuver to tail enemy ships, and you are able to avoid the tiresome turning battles into which those skirmishes frequently devolve. Vendetta Online's combat is twitch-based, but unlike most space sims, it doesn't unfold like a flight sim in space. Space stations aren't particularly large, but they feature the most interesting designs in the game. Yet the game offers a reasonably effective mix of space-based trading and multiplayer combat. Vendetta Online was largely created by four individuals, and its modest production budget is sometimes unkindly evident. But with less green expectations, smaller developers still hope to prove the genre's potential. Microsoft, 3DO, and EA launched and then abandoned Allegiance, Jumpgate, and Earth & Beyond, respectively. Those bets largely didn't pay off, as online space sims have struggled commercially, even when they were critically well received. Back in the early massively multiplayer salad days, several developers gambled that space sims would be the next big online genre.
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