Digital Curve allowed us to try Space crew, a real-time strategy game on the Bomber Crew style by the same developer Runner Duck, but set on a spaceship traveling between space bases, asteroids and alien attacks. Like its spiritual predecessor, Space Crew is also a survival offering a kind of quick and immediate experience, despite various strategy game wits, the management brackets and GDR components.
Survive the alien threat
Games like Space Crew don't offer a real story, but rather an opening and a setting that contextualize the mission progression of the player. Broadly speaking, we are told of the existence of aliens that hinder the expansion and human actions in space, and therefore delivering goods or simply looking for clues to understand what is happening always involves having to defend against attacks by enemy spacecraft.
As in Faster Than Light or the Bomber Crew itself, the player assembles a crew with different duties to manage the ship in the most disparate situations. When it comes to hooking onto a portal to travel at the speed of light theengineer must move the energy of the reactors directly into the motors while the pilot it will serve to undertake the journey, when instead it will be a question of fighting the player will find himself having to move here and there security officers and at communication to have more places available to fight in the ship's positions, while in the meantime the engineer will repair any damage.
Personnel management is obviously done hectic in combat, both at a distance and in melee when some alien will try a boarding. All this can then be assisted by the player controlled camera to locate and lock on targets as happens in Bomber Crew, or from theenergy allocation reactors in upgrading shields or offensive weapons.
Ship staff can earn experience and then acquire new ones ability, and its equipment it is customizable as is the ship. Upgrades and gear are unlocked through the search and can be purchased through i money, two resources that both are provided to us by completing missions.
It is from base in Athens, just outside Earth's orbit, all operations before and after a space journey will be handled, from customization to the simple choice of a mission. In the base it is also possible to find out about the state of the game's "history" through the Hall.
Sci-fi and immediacy
The entire Space Crew gaming experience makesimmediacy his mantra: despite the fact that it is an RTS with management and role components, there are very few keys to memorize to play. THE tutorial they accompany the player in a minimally invasive way in taking the first steps, easily bringing him to have a complete overview of the actions that can be carried out in the base and in the spaceship.
even the graphic sector, despite his simplicity, manages to perfectly communicate his intent with the visual impact: cold lights and the predominance of blue and black, for example, bring the player into a sci-fi dimension and spatial, while 3D graphic models have few rounded polygons, to the point where human characters literally look like gods digital funko-pop. Camera movements and scene-to-scene transitions are smooth and pleasing to the eye, as are graphic effects such as focus. The various citations to the most famous science fiction works are also pleasant.
The game interfaces are clear and simple to understand in any situation, and therefore the only complicated task of the title is the player's task of sorting the crew around the spaceship during the most difficult missions. As for the sound sector, the music does not excel and soon becomes monotonous despite being contextual, while the ambient sounds do their duty sufficiently.
The sore point of Space Crew must unfortunately be identified in its durability: although well thought out, the gameplay very quickly turns out to be monotonous and repetitive, forcing the player to pick up the right title for some hit and run opportunity. One of the most boring things is, perhaps, the mechanics of targeting via a camera operated by the player, as it serves no purpose other than to distract the player from the action inside their spaceship: once you have located the targets we cannot do anything else with this mechanism.
However, we look forward to the arrival of the new content available at the official launch on 15 October in order to provide further opinions about it, and perhaps improve the quality of life of this title.
Conclusions
Space Crew is practically sci-fi Bomber Crew: a real-time strategic video game set in the space between interplanetary deliveries and alien threats, with some management elements and a progression of the gidierristic characters. The player has the tasks of assembling a crew with different roles, of customizing his ship and of leaving for the most disparate missions as long as the spaceship and staff manage not to suffer irreversible damage. It is a title made for the immediacy of use, and therefore, to have fun at its best with Space Crew it is advisable to face small game sessions or you risk running into a strong repeatability that is boring.
