Games I Love: Space Pirates and Zombies 2!

I was originally going to do this one first as I have put the most time into it since purchasing it last Christmas but figured I'd do them in order, because more content is good! This game was seemingly quite polarising so far as fans of the original went but personally I prefer this one to the first one for reasons of which I will go into more detail later on in this post. In short sandbox space games such as Elite and Freelancer are among my most loved type of sci-fi space game (alongside 4X strategy ones.)

This is the campaign galaxy map, there are others you can use if you go for sandbox mode!

This screen is where you will spend a lot of your time in Space Pirates and Zombies 2, the galaxy map. Here is where you will do everything from assembling your mother-ship, docking at star-bases, hunting down enemies or in a lot of cases at the start fleeing from them. The galaxy map itself actually really does bring across the more living and dynamic galaxy this game possesses, the AI captains can do almost anything that you can do, they roam the galaxy, trading, looting, fighting, upgrading their ships and cursing the void as they sail to the nearest station in an escape pod. It is not just window dressing either, you could literally sit in a corner and watch the galaxy changing around you.

The mother-ship this time around takes a more direct role in the action and is the ship you will likely spend most of your time piloting. Other ships are now called strike-craft and act as your support ships, featuring many of the hulls now rendered in full and colourful 3D, another departure that met with seemingly mixed reactions compared to the original. You issue context orders usually with the 'E' key to your strike-craft and can even fly them yourself if you choose, personally I love capital ships so I always take the helm of the mother-ship. You can fire and even aim all the weapons yourself which is useful for knocking damaged parts off enemy mother-ships or hitting various power-ups that can pop up. However my favourite mode as someone whom loves capital ships is the so called 'battle-wagon' mode, this lets the ships AI auto-target for you prioritising the ship you lock onto but enabling all your other weapons to fire at any other targets when they aren't in your targets firing arc.

It's hard to do the explosions justice in a screenshot!

The battles themselves are pretty spectacular to take part in which is one reason I enjoy the move to 3D over the 2D of the previous game even if it is just a cosmetic one. You fly your ship around on a 2D plane but everything is rendered in full 3D, the explosions in particular are pretty spectacular especially if you take out any of the larger mother-ships and bases later on. The modular nature of the mother-ships means that damaging one part of it more than another can actually break off that part, enemy getting away from you? Just hammer his engines til they fall off. That wing with the twin particle hoses tearing you a new one? Shoot it off! It is also part of what makes the explosions pretty satisfying to watch. Escape pods flying off as explosions ripple along the hull just before the entire ship blasts into three pieces, I may be a game-play over graphics person but I still appreciate a good explosion.

Things start off pretty small with you not having many parts but eventually you can build quite a monster!

The mother-ship is also central to the new ship design system, you construct it using a variety of different building blocks around it's central core. Sub-cores are the first of these they basically for the.. Well, core of your ship they determine the shape of your ship and what ports will be available for things such as wings, noses and engines. All of those have different affects, stat increases and possible weapons attached to them as well as coming in small, medium and large sizes (requiring 1, 2 or 3 relevant open ports in order to be attached to your ship.) You can make nice neat shapes, you can have a mother-ship wider or longer as you prefer. To begin with you generally just bolt on whatever you can salvage or scrounge up but later on you'll be able to buy and even have ship parts delivered to you via a catalogue system if you don't want to fly around to find things yourself. You can also choose the weapons of your strike-craft as well, as before your strike-craft are not just acquired from looting blueprints from wrecks but you also level them up by acquiring more of the blueprints of the same ships. You can even use the tractor beam in combat to re-attach parts of your ship that have fallen off, never really used it too often but it's a nice touch still!

As before you also level up but rather than it being a kind of research system you earn certain unlocks at every level such as more sub-cores for your mother-ship or access to another strike-craft hangar but also a randomly selected perk. These form your stat increases, more health, increased armour to stop ship parts breaking off, faster reloading etc. I will admit this is the one area I think I miss the original game on in making your own build with the research points as it were but it really is just a minor gripe for me.

The living galaxy it creates is fairly compelling.

Now I mentioned near the start there was a living dynamic galaxy so I'll go into more detail about that. Every single one of the 200 or so AI captains that roam the galaxy pretty much can do what you do (with the exception of starting a faction.) They loot resource stockpiles, sell their loot, upgrade their ships, befriend or destroy other captains not unlike you. The various factions expand, grow, wage wars all with or without your interaction. Especially at the start of the game you are a very small ship, bolting on junk-parts and just trying to gather enough resources to survive. Early on most aspiring captains will likely cut their teeth in the various arenas at each star-base to get some XP and resources which early on are hard to come by.

You can join one of the existing factions and help them in their fights and conquests or even make your own faction. It's a fairly simplistic empire building aspect to the game but I still appreciate it being there. You basically build your starbases, upgrade them, defend them and hire other captains to man them for a cut of their loot.

Resources still play a large part in the game, to begin with you'll be scrounging from various slowly regenerating resources piles scattered around the galaxy or later on extorting them from enemies or pillaging star-bases for them. Rez returns as the ever sought after resource that acts as fuel for your mother-ship to traverse the galaxy and feed your crew. The crew or goons maintain your ship, not enough and your mother-ships hull starts to deteriorate too many and your rez supplies will burn up fast. Then there is scrap, the post-apocalypse in space equivalent of money and the resource most people accept as trade. It may not be the deepest or most complex example of a living/dynamic galaxy but I found this aspect to be infinitely compelling.

The zombies of course also return to turn all that is living into twisted hunks of ship and flesh but I'll avoid too many spoilers about them. Suffice to say I found them no less challenging to fight than the first one.

In addition to the story campaign which sees the continuation of the story from the original, the return of some of it's characters and some hilarious voice acting you also have the sandbox mode. This has so many options for tweaking and changing the game and it's set-up. From faction sizes, zombie and bandit strength, several different galaxy maps if or when the zombies even appear and the like.

It is of course far from perfect as with everything:

• Lack of tooltips and mouse-overs: For the most part the UI is alright but when it comes to ship design and the shop interface some mouse-over tool-tips would be massively helpful in figuring out if part a is better than part b.
• Slow Start: At the start you won't find yourself engaging in many battles outside of the arena as even the junk flying bandits will stomp your feeble ship meaning it's a lot of scavenging and scrounging. It does add to the whole post galactic apocalypse feel but still it can be a little slow.
• Threat Level Early On: Whilst later on skill and a good mother-ship and strike-craft set-up you can defeat higher level threats or even multiple aggressors, early on though engaging higher threat level targets is usually just the end of you.

I admit to being biased with this game as I love free-roaming sandbox space games but the sheer amount of ways you can configure the sandbox and the story campaign as well it's hard not to recommend this. It's fun, colourful, compelling and I've gotten a ton of enjoyment out of it myself but then I am biased, I love me my space games! Now if you don't mind I better take the mother-ship out to go stomp a rather uppity fellow whom is trying to slap my star-base around.

Even fleshy zombie ships explode quite nicely!

Old Games I Still Love: Space Pirates and Zombies

This game holds a special place in my gaming heart for a few reasons, first off it was the very first game I bought into early access for back when Kick-starter and the like were just taking off. Secondly this took me back to older games in my child-hood, top-down space shooters with a sort of simplistic thrust-momentum physics engine. I was initially just going to look at the second game but if becoming a blogger isn't a good excuse for revisiting old games I loved, then nothing ever will be! Also it's the most Halloween themed game I could find in my collection that was also a space game so, win-win!

Whilst each element of the game is fairly simple the way they all combine together makes for some surprising depth you may not expect from the screenshots. At a glance it looks like a top-down space shooter, using a basic thrust and momentum system as I mentioned before but there is a lot more to it than first appears.

The battle portion of the game is as you would expect where you will be spending the majority of your play-time. You orient your ship, aim and fire your weapons with the mouse cursor and use the keyboard for thrusting, changing which ship you control. You then typically perform a variety of missions (escorting, blowing up toxic waste, destroying satellites, destroying enemies to name a few) or just generally roam around in the sectors looking for loot, resources and enemies to blow up. The variety of ships you can eventually get and fly along with the weapons and other items you can outfit yourself with really add a lot to this and it's helped by some impressive 2D artwork and special effects, the explosions and wrecks of ships I personally find particularly impressive.

A relatively small battle but it's zoomed out and these are some of the larger ships!

All that alone would be fairly impressive but then you add in the fact there is also some fleet management and ship design. You never fly alone, you can have various other ships and can give them various behaviours and stances or even order them directly from a pause screen tactical map. Destroying a ship you don't have will give you parts of it's blueprint eventually meaning you can build it for yourself. Weapon and item blueprints can also be purchased (or looted from the smoldering wrecks) of stations eventually giving you a vast arsenal to customise your fleet with. The ships themselves have various hard-points that you can customise the weapons of depending on the ship type and the weapons you have access to. The mothership only occasionally features in certain kinds of encounters and story missions but it acts as your base of sorts, if it gets destroyed, game over.

The ship design and hangar screen, whilst you can't design the hulls, weapons and other utilities you can!

You can further customise the way you prefer to play via the research system which is basically like an RPG leveling system of sorts. Data can be accumulated mostly via destroying enemies, as mission rewards and just found in crates, get enough and you level up giving you points to spend on improving various aspects of your rag-tag fleet. In general you can improve whatever you think you will get the most use out of, for example if you prefer cannons to beam weapons you can just improve them, shields, armour, hull, cloaking and more can all be boosted in effectiveness to make for some interesting ways to play if you ask me. Especially as you find more blueprints and ships to make use of them on.

The research screen is where you spend all your hard earned level ups!

Also there is a resource management aspect to the game some have already been mentioned, REZ is the primary resource it is mined from asteroids, given from mission rewards and even from destroyed ships. You use it to build new ships, buy blueprints and given how many ships you can often lose it is arguably the most important resource. Next up is the crew or 'goons' having crew aboard your ships makes them more effective, enabling them to fight off boarding parties, repair the ships hull and the like. They are also sometimes used to trade with at stations for usually to bribe your way through a warpgate rather than fight through it.

The galaxy is randomly generated at the start of the game and you have some options for customising it too!

And also we have the exploration side of things, you move around the galaxy completing missions for each sectors self contained civilian or military factions whom may also involved a third faction and later a fourth faction) the bounty hunters. Generally as you knock over the various warp-gates to unlock access to new sectors you complete missions, level up, get ship and item blueprints until you can progress to the higher level areas whilst also following the story.

The bounty hunters, added in a post release patch usually only attack you if you annoy one of the factions in the systems they 'protect' a lot. You can pay off any bounty you have accrued if you don't feel like messing with them but the ships they fly are among the best so, acquiring the blueprints can make the risk worthwhile. Just be careful if you do, they can jam your motherships warp drive and prevent you from escaping unless you pay or fight them off.

The system map, beware the ire of the bounty hunters they can ruin your day pretty fast!

There is a final aspect but it feels a bit like a spoiler so read this section at your own peril. The zombies have their own ecology which differs massively from how you play up to that point. They typically don't use shields for their ships and generally just have rapid hull regeneration, also they 'fire' zombie clusters at your ship whom then try to beat their way inside and board them. If your crew fails to fight them off and the ships health drops to zero rather than exploding the ship gets turned into a zombie version and then starts attacking meaning you can often find your own ships attacking you. The zombies can be truly terrifying as even the largest ships can succumb if enough zombies board it which can cause a spiral of destruction, needless to say they are definitely the main antagonists and a very interesting one at that.

This was my first early access purchase and it turned into an impressive game especially given it was made by only two people. Space combat and exploration games will always pique my interest and this is just one of the many games of it's type I love. Had it just been a simplistic top-down space shooter I may have just ignored it but all the various aspects make for something with far more depth than first appears.

Sandbox space games will always hold a special place in my heard regardless of how deep they are, ever since I first stumbled an old copy of Frontier: Elite 2 as a teen. It's no EVE Online in terms of depth but there's enough complexity and general fun in this that kept me occupied for quite a while. Whether it was hunting down that last ship blueprint to make my rag-tag fleet awesome or just respeccing for a completely different play-style. Even the defeats didn't make me put it down, hard battles that tore your ships apart and depleted my resources often had me pondering how to change my fleet and approach whilst mining more resources. I distinctly remember my typical shields up and guns blazing approach not working at a certain point and I reworked my entire fleet into a cloaking, bomb launching strike force. It took a while to get the hang of those slow moving explosives at first whilst micromanaging the targets of my others ships but when it worked, I was turning even the toughest enemy ships into so much space junk, floating off into the void.

It isn't without it's flaws however:

• Difficulty Spikes: Depending on the galaxy you generate you can have some brutal difficulty spikes in smaller galaxies or find yourself grinding through dozens of trivial warp-gates just to find one blueprint. Thankfully you can customise how big you want the galaxy to be, the prevalence of blueprints and the base difficulty.
• Can Get Grindy in Regard to Resources/Blueprints: Early on it's not so bad as the ships are small and cheap to build and you don't have a massive amount of space for reserves. Later on in the game larger ships and fancy guns can deplete your resources rapidly in heavy fighting sometimes meaning you have to fly off to a mining base and farm resources for a while. It becomes a lot more of a problem later in the game due to the zombies.
• Weapon and item stats given in bars not numbers: More of a UI gripe than a genuine flaw but no numbers are given in the UI it usually gives a comparative bar on the strengths of one weapon versus the one you are replacing it with. 

All in all this is an old favourite despite it's small flaws, it has enough aspects of sand-box space games to keep it interesting and a story to nudge things along. So if you are after some enjoyable shooting, looting and explosions you can't go far wrong with this little gem! Now if you'll excuse me, there are about a hundred zombies trying to board my ship...

Games I Love: Homeworld Remastered Collection

If you read my last blog post this one will likely not be a surprise, the Homeworld games took my love of sci-fi space battles and dialed it up to eleven. I played both the original Homeworld and Homeworld 2 to death way back in the day so when a remastered collection was announced it will surprise no-one that I bought it and didn't regret it. Seeing those battles with shinier graphics was always going to be a plus and not having to spend ages tinkering with resolutions and trying to get the older versions working on modern systems ensured this was a no-brainer for me. I'll do my best to avoid any spoilers given how epic I think the Homeworld story is so without further ado, here we go!

The remaster makes this particular shot I first remember the game for that much more epic!

Rather than looking at each game separately I'll just look at the collection as a whole given they use the same engine (or so it appears to me at least.) Now the Homeworld games for me always sat alongside RTS giants like Total Annihilation and Age of Empires.

It was also the first space strategy game I know of to make full use of fully 3D movement, you could approach enemies from above and below, as most space games of the time even if they were 3D were often locked to a single-plane.

Rather than a base as in most RTS games, you start off with a mothership which takes on the role of a base but you aren't bogged down by having to place buildings. Anything you have unlocked via the research ship can be produced from the mothership itself, everything from the tiniest of fighter craft to massive capital ships and everything in between. The economy of the game is fairly simple, you sent out resource collectors to harvest dust clouds, asteroids or wreckage for RU's or resource units and spend those for research and construction.

Some amazing vista's really show off the improved graphics.

From there on your usual objectives are to find and defeat the enemy which is where the real meat of the game lies, in it's combat. Each ship has its role to play from bombers unleashing their payloads against larger capital ships to interceptors who shoot down those bombers, to see a huge battle in motion is a sight to behold. The improved graphics certainly help in that regard, larger capital ships slowly moving into position as shells and ion beams slice through space, fighters and corvettes buzzing all around it's hard to sell how epic it can look in some screenshots, one of those games that just looks far better in motion.

Personally I think the story of the Homeworld games is amazing and was a large reason the game stuck with me so long though I am loathe to spoil any of the games story. It is that story which keeps the campaign mode ticking along, the cut-scenes whilst short usually do enough to keep you invested in the story and wondering what might happen next.

There is no veterancy system in place for units as there is in Deserts of Kharak but you are still encouraged not to mindlessly throw away your units. Your fleet is persistent from mission to mission and the resources you gather are finite, so your ships have more value simply based on that, losing a destroyer or heavy cruiser can be crushing. You can also capture enemy ships using Salvage Corvettes in the first game or Marine Frigates in the second (not everything can be captured but it can add another element to your engagements.) This can enable you to supplement your fleet if you are skilled enough to pull off such captures or even just a way of acquiring more resources if you retire those units.

The battles can get pretty epic, this I would say is a mid sized battle in a skirmish match!

Is the remastered collection perfect? No, it certainly has it's flaws and quirks though they are few and far between and in some cases for me they are more gripes than flaws:

• Lack of statistics or information in game relating to certain things: Mainly aimed at the first Homeworld but no numbers are given on how things change or improve between the various stances. For example aggressive stance makes your ships do more damage but move more slowly though it doesn't state by how much. The behavior's such as passive, aggressive and defensive are also likewise not really clearly explained, nor are the benefits of formations.
• Removal of the fuel mechanic in the original Homeworld: This is more of a gripe for me than an actual flaw. In the original Homeworld fighters and corvettes had fuel so they would need to dock with a support ship to refuel but it does make things overall easier to get into so as I said, more of a gripe than a flaw.
• Enemy Scaling in Homeworld 1: Whilst I am fairly certain that in Homeworld 2 the numbers of enemies tended to scale based on your fleet from the get go I am pretty sure it wasn't in the original. This can lead to some tricky spots in the campaign, as I found out to my cost on two or three occasions.

In the end thanks to having both campaigns and a robust skirmish mode it's hard not to recommend this to anyone looking for a space combat RTS. It has more than enough to do in it to keep you busy for a while. Also given the current lack of many new RTS games even coming out these days much less anything like Homeworld it just makes it all the more worthwhile to check out.

There are also some good mods out there even if a few of my favourites haven't made the transition yet so far as I know (Star Wars Warlords, The Point Defence Systems mods etc.) Which is one of the big pluses of being a PC gamer!

In my opinion though this is one of the better remasters out there, now if you'll excuse me an enemy fleet decided to pop over for a spot of tea and ion cannons!

And I got lucky timing that screenshot!