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...