"But why?"
(media.scored.co)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (50)
sorted by:
Fair enough, but then it's still worth a couple playthroughs to feel it out.
I still like the space exploration genera. Got a recommendation?
A personal favorite of mine is the now very old Space Pirates and Zombies. I put way too much time into the original SPAZ and its still quite fun.
Its nowhere near as complex as something you'd find even from the second half the 2010s, but its also probably less than a Dollar somewhere.
You know, I was just about to buy that yesterday (well, SPAZ 2), but it didn't seem like it was up my alley. It seemed like it was basically a top down shooter? What was it actually like (or SPAZ 2 if you've played it)?
SPAZ 2 went in a wildly different direction and I have no idea what became of it as I played it briefly on release and gave up. But it was still in development with a lot of major changes apparently happening so I can't comment on if its good or not now.
SPAZ 1 however is a top down shooter, but its a lot more strategic and exploration based than that genre would normally mean. You build a ship that fits what you want to do, and go out and do missions to build rep and either buy better/different ships for different needs or progress deeper into the story. Its very arcadey, in that most stuff is contained to the galaxy you are in and you basically jumped through treating them as "levels" with only like an hours worth of anything in each one. Though its been a decade so my memories might be a little degraded so I can't give you reliable detailed stuff.
Its pretty similar to Starsector, the quintessential slav jank space game that I'm sure you know of. But if you haven't just go with that as its essentially the "better" version of SPAZ 1 because it wasn't quite as Indie developed.
I actually liked a bunch of the reviews I heard for SPAZ 2, but I'll give SPAZ 1 a shot the next time I see it on sale. I was never a fan of top-down shooters (mostly because I was never good enough to play even halfway through stuff like Geometry Wars, even if it was beautiful. But if there's more of an exploration and building aspect, it might be fun.
The reviews did say SPAZ 2 seemed wildly different from SPAZ 1. It seems like they have totally distinct audiences. I too, am not sure why. They do sound vaguely similar, but they're abjectly different as far as the audience is concerned.
Hmmm, tough one because I'm pretty disillusioned with the procedural generation crutch most of them use so poorly. If you're after the chill vibe of quiet space exploration and a feeling of vastness I'd say elite dangerous was pretty good at making that mechanically interesting. Never tried the latest expansion with the more FPS elements though, so my knowledge there is very dated.
They're not strictly exploration focused but I found the first play through of X4 and Satisfactory to have quite satisfying sci-fi themed exploration. Not much replay value in the exploration of either because the area is hand-made, but the quality of the first playthrough is also much enhanced for that same reason. X4 is an acquired taste, but I suspect you'll adapt to the eurojank controls relatively well and it might appeal to your factorio loving sensibilities. And satisfactory is easy to brute force the exploration by just mass building huge ramps and jetpacking everywhere, but if you just keep it simple and look at the environment more closely you'll find all sorts of hidden goodies and deliberately crafted little platforming puzzles.
If you want the feel of pure space frontier hell and you've never played it, you could try maybe diving into Eve online and banning yourself from all third party knowledge sources and maybe even in-game global chats. Trying to figure everything out yourself might be funny. Or it might just ruin your month(s). 😆