There are a handful of occasions when we’ve not just been wowed by the large amount of real-estate a Matrox triple-monitor setup provides, but we’ve seen the practical side of it too. Generally speaking it’s an ideal hardware solution for any MMO, what with their inherent intimidating number of menu screens and HUD buttons.

Jumpgate Evolution is no exception to this rule, particularly in your first few faltering steps into space. Being born and exiting the womb of your hangar is a clumsy business at first, so the additional awareness a fly’s-eye vision provides comes in handy, as well as the regenerative powers of your hangar.

Fortunately, finding your way around the mandatory starter zone of Jumpgate is a more intuitive process. Having been spawned into a noob area known as the Tengassil Trench, there was one thing we wanted to know: which of the hundreds of other spacecraft do we have to point our guns at to complete our first mission? The answer was more forthcoming from the enemy themselves than our mission log, as several marauders in light fighter spacecraft bore down on us. But Mike Rowland kindly filled us in on some of the details anyway. “We’ve basically got three separate storylines for each of the nations – they’re there as starter areas to walk people through. So you’ll get introduced to the enemy and as you go through the area you’ll get introduced to your individual story that sets the scene for later on in the game. NetDevil has put lots of intrigue and mystery in Hell’s Gate as part of your development and you’ll discover elements of who and what you are later on. But what we wanted to achieve with those first sectors is to learn how to fly your ship, equip your ship, learn the kind of mission mechanics we have in the game and learn how to fight.

Those are the core mechanics of the game, the fighting and doing what you can for the good of the nation.” Fighting will come as second nature to anyone who has played an air combat simulation game, or even an FPS. It’s no more complicated than combat in a game like After Burner, the only caveat being that there will be some baddies, even in the noob zone, who have an unfair advantage in terms of firepower and armour. No sooner had we shot down half a dozen marauders, gained half a bar of XP and fulfilled our first mission’s requirements than we foolishly tackled Sybil, a beefier ‘signature’ version of the weedy fighters we’d been swatting out of space. The encounter left us limping back towards base with no shields and a warning klaxon informing us that hull armour had been severely compromised.

Finding your way among asteroids and other celestial bodies is difficult without the mission focus toggle set to ‘on’, but even with the arrow pointing us in the direction of our hangar, navigating this 360-degree, three-dimensional space is tricky – especially when the entrance to your base is a mine shaft built into one of the many floating chunks of rock you’re trying to avoid. Guiding your ship into the hangar is easy though and to avoid any possibility of a last minute clash with the walls, causing a final, fatal breach in our hull, there’s an auto-pilot that sucks you into safety.

… continued