Some of these settings dont show up on the settings menu at the title screen, you'll need to open the options menu once you have actually started the game to see gameplay / customization settings.

1) Gameplay settings

Automatic Breaking Power -
Ramping this up halfway or more is going to make the game feel a lot more like your classic Descent or FPS, since you will stop moving after releasing the thrust. Later on you can use the manual break to save energy and gain more control.

Gameplay Speed -
It can really help to slow the game down a bit until you get your bearings

Target Lead Indicator -
This will be familiar to Freespace style space combat gamers, but it's really not as necessary in this game and adds a lot of clutter to the screen, try turning it off and see how you like it.

2) Video Settings

The motion blur and effects on the higher settings can make the gameplay feel really sluggish and wonky depending on your sensibilities and machine. Since the graphics are stylized, setting them to the lowest setting doesn't affect the looks too much, and radically improves the responsiveness of your movement as well as visibility. Also make sure that mouse smoothing is OFF.

***Remember: there's custom video settings at the bottom of the list of presets! theres alot in there including FOV slider, antialiasing, etc. my advice for smooth gameplay is to turn off a lot of the post processing related things but keep as many effects as u can since they reduce performance a lot less than the post stuff. toggle the fps display on and try to keep it near the 60 cap.

3) Customize Settings

The toggle "Yellow Enemies" will add high contrast brightskins to enemy ships and make them a lot easier to see.

Be sure to cycle through the environment color settings, some of the themes can improve your visibility a lot (I like grey matter).

4) Controls

Depending on your sensibilities, there are some ways you can remap the controls to make flying a lot easier. I remapped strafe up to shift and down to spacebar for example, and set my targeting, booster, and brake to the extra mouse3, mouse4, and mouse5 buttons I have on my mouse, and set the cursor/interrupt/menu mode to TAB. It takes some experimenting to find the
best controls for you, don't just rely on the default mapping.


any other tips? let me know in the comments, I will update the guide if I have any ideas as I play more.