Space. The so called he final frontier. At least until we discover another frontier, then it will be the previous one. Until then we better ship cargo for large corporations and fend off space pirates.

Space Run Galaxy is apparently a sequel to Space Run, a game I have not played. In this one rather than individual missions you are given a map and told to go out and grind away to gain some credits. I started off enjoying this one. It kept me awake past midnight, which is a hard thing to do nowadays.

You start off as an already experienced trader, from under the tutorage of a guy called Buck. He's not some kind of anthro-deer, but he does have a few scars and a neat hat. You are set to work filling our shipping contracts for various organisations with the help of your trusty AI Evve-36. And to make it really on the nose, Buck's butler AI is called Addam. I did not stick around long enough to see if there was a Abeel, Caiin, and Sseth.

Of course, you the player, may have never played anything more than solitaire before, so it starts you off with a super easy mission to give you a false sense of your capability and plenty of affirmations on just how wonderful you are. Do not worry. You'll be getting the opposite very soon and wanting to rip out Evve-36's voice box, and damn the idea of an artificial sophont identity.

At the core of this game, it is tower defence. It really threw me off at first as the camera feels 'reversed' from what I expected, the camera itself moving and not the ship. It does not take long to get use to, and there's no rotation or zoom to worry about. Just pan around the screen and tap space if you somehow lose where the ship is in relation to your own position.

Starting off with a small amount of laser weapons, you place them on a hexgrid map of your ship that is borderline a VARN. Fending off asteroids, parasites, pirates, and lumbering dreadnoughts. You don't know the full sequence in advance, and each run has a level of RNG to it, even paths you have already taken. Build slow, build careful, and cross your fingers that it does not swarm you too hard too early.

Enemies drop hexscrews you can use as per-run currency. Don't bother trying to save them to the end, it all gets reset once you reach a destination. With enough screws you can plonk down another weapon. Or shields, regen, power-boosters, and thrusters.

Thrusters also give you Focus, ripped from the pale bleeding heart of the publisher itself, than you can use to momentarily powerup placed items for various short term bonuses. Personally I mainly used the hexscrew generator and weapon power shot attacks from it. Though there is a need to balance and preserve this stuff as it is easy to waste it and get into trouble. Camera/ship wobbles when you are trying to target something is bad enough.

Completing a trade run gives you Space Credits based on how much of the trade survived, and how quickly you made it over. You then spend these on upgrading the amount of gear you have available per run, rather than the power of it. While you can later buy upgraded versions of the base inventory products, they are to supplement, not replace.
However, you'll also gain Red, Green, and Blue product types from a successful run, each with their own upgraded versions. And the mechanic trader requires both RGB and credits to actually buy these pieces of equipment.

This means that you'll be grinding. A lot. To get the upgrade types you need to the destination you want them at for the mechanic to build stuff for you as your player inventory (outside of credit and ships) is based on a per location bases.

And here's the main issue. The hidden multi-player component. While the game advertises itself as being a Single Player game. It does want you to create an account (thankfully seamlessly within Steam) and put up contracts for other players to run for you. You get your gear, they get the credit.

When an old game only has four active players per day, this does not work as intended. There's no longer a playerbase for this to function, and really should have been highlighted on the storefront page. Earlier this year I played through Two Point Hospital which did similar things and also pissed me off rightly.

Get off my gravel driveway you damn no good kids. Wait, there's no kids here. Well, I'm still going to shake my fist.

Rather brutal really quickly, and the hidden multi-player component is not appreciated. If you can get past the absolutely awful community full of total 'git gud' arseholes on the forum (and why the hell were you visiting the Steam forum. Are you insane?) then there is something fun to be played here.

But it is a grind, and not the usual type of grind I enjoy. At time of writing it is less than a block of chocolate and will fill in half a day until it hooks you or you uninstall in utter frustration at it.

Game Acquisition: Humble Choice - March 2017
Platform Used: Steam
Twitter Threads: 1 - 22 December 2024
Bluesky Threads: 1 - 22 December 2024
PC Used: Scorptec Master-RTX2070 2019 MK1

OS *: Windows Vista, 7, 8.1, 10
Processor: AMD/Intel Dual core 2.4 GHz
Memory: 3 GB RAM
Graphics: 1 GB, OpenGL 3.3 Compatible NVIDIA Geforce 9800 GT/AMD Radeon HD 3870/Intel Iris 5100
Storage: 3 GB available space