An hour in and I'm fairly impressed with the game. Clean UI, beautiful graphics, docking being its own little mini-game. But the one thing I have to nitpick has to be how traveling to sectors works. You select your destination, fast forward, then you are teleported there.

I've done five different VIP transport missions and each one involved me going to a station, undocking, teleporting to a new area and docking again within the span of 2 to 3 minutes. Easiest money of my life.

I know it is unfair to compare the game to the X series, but it's always going to happen. The Jump Gates kept the illusion of progression to new systems. You know each time you go through one you're just loading a different map, but even still you never felt as though you were removed from the flow of the game.

You had a route to plan out and you had to live through the experience. You see how the economy is determined by distance to suppliers first hand.

The way its handled in Helium Rain just doesn't do that for me. It feels almost like a cheat, the true scale of the system is lost on you because distance doesn't really matter. For you personally, you'll arrive at the opposite end of occupied space within seconds with the click of a mouse, regardless of where you are.

I don't know what I can sugges to fix this, short of abandoning the fast forward mechanic all together and opting for a different means of system-wide travel. Maybe even just a requirement of some sort before fast traveling, a seperate option required to leave a system instead of speeding up time. Or an animation, stuff that makes you feel as though you genuinely traveled there and experienced a long journey. I just thought I'd openly nitpick in the hopes of stirring some ideas. If my criticism helps improve something along the way, then I'm happy.

One of the only games I'm genuinely excited to see come out of early access one day. Keep up the good work.