I wish to comment only on the grammar/spelling of the free preview. I do believe most buyers would not pick up on the problems pointed out by Lucas Jung, but I sincerely hope the publication will be run through (at least) a spell-checker before its final production. The internet has exposed the poor education many people have, but I cannot help expecting a major product to contain as few spelling errors as possible. My own education is extremely limited, yet I do know how to run a spell checker. Although misspellings in the preview are few, it would be nice if the editor would fix them and others that may exist in the RPG before I.F. is made available. I still give it 3 stars because everything else about the game seems great.

I hope that a whole lot of editing happens before the final release: spelling errors abounded, I saw more sentences with improper grammar than not (mixed tense and mixed plural/singular were especially common), and many of the sentences with correct grammar were nonetheless difficult to parse because of awkwardly phrased prose. If I were rating this solely on the quality of the writing I would have given it one star instead of two.

On the plus side, the artwork was very impressive and the layout looked professional. In fact, I'm completely dumbfounded at the uneven production quality: they obviously put a lot of attention and effort into the art and layout, so why is the writing so painfully bad? They should have bought fewer illustrations and spent the resulting savings on a better editor instead. If I were rating this solely on the quality of the artwork I would have given it five stars; for the layout, four.

There simply wasn't enough content in the preview to be able to tell how well designed and balanced the rules are, but I'm holding out hope. I can put up with bad writing as long as the underlying mechanics work right. I'll most likely end up buying this when it first comes out, because that will be the only way to know for sure.

Pathfinder compatible? Well, not really, as a quick look at the table on page 6 will show. This is a separate branch of the well-known family tree and I can only guess that Avalon thought that would sell better than "d20 system". Art by Poser, editing by .. from the title page, no-one, though spelling and missed find-replace work is only mildly distracting here. It looks reasonable for third-party work if a new D&D/SF mashup with a medium-light learning curve is what you want, not a standout as SF systems go generally. Free download or not, it should include the OGL.

This product makes me really, really excited for the full game. I've always wanted to play a sci-fi Pathfinder game, and this looks like it will deliver.

My only gripes, though are:

3d rendering: Most of it is nice, but I'm still not loving anything with exposed skin in a render, even though there are programs coughSkinVuecough that allow such rendering without such a heavy uncanny valley effect. Typos: Few and far between, but there's some, the most glaring (for me), is when being a Space Pirate captain "take no soul".

Ultimately, I feel that this game has the potential to overcome its backgrounds on the d20 system (Yeah, I have to bash it once a review, being a d6/d8/d10 snob), and be a really, really fun game. I'm just not 100% sure, but you can look for yourself.