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!