It’s the total sweet spot: a bunch of great, old game design ideas, streamlined and made user-friendly; a healthy amount of genre-mixing; and just enough totally new ideas to pull the whole thing together.

Moment-to-moment gameplay is a top-down 360 degree space shooter, complete with boss battles and things exploding wherever there’s room. In a neat twist, your mother ship is also in the battles, and you can instruct it to follow you to different locations to help with the shooting. Beyond that, they’ve managed to work in the Star Control 2 space station: collect enough minerals to make and research more stuff, like new ships, guns, turrets, and engines. (Be unafraid: the mineral collection is done while shooting stuff, saving you the dreaded trip to the surface.) Finally, this is all tied together with a galactic map, which lets you choose from a few strategic objectives: destroy the aliens’ mining operations; do some mining of your own; or take on the big, bad alien boss. This last element is what kept me up way too late last night with its “just one more turn” compulsion.

You can read GameTunnel’s glowing review, or just go download the free demo. It was released in 2003, but many of the innovations struck me as quite fresh.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 at 6:36 pm and is filed under Game Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.