The Space Game

Since this is the first rant of the blog I'll say a few things to inform those that might not be aware of my earlier rants.

Some people may be familiar with my long winded rants from such games as amorphous+, Warlord's Heroes, DDO, etc. I try to look at every aspect of a game I don't like and proceed to state why I loathe it.

Lets start with the name "The Space Game" so generic, I had half expected it to be another over rated game in the style of Zunderfury, whom has had many a rant from me in the past. Instead it is...the space game.

I say that not as an insult to the title but more to the game itself, it has no real form. It is an RTS without the RTS, it is closer to a TD without the rails. The game has you collecting resources by using "impossible to move once placed" mining units.

The energy source of the game is solar energy. That would be okay if the game had any sense of scale, however in order to do just about anything you have to use solar energy, you can upgrade the unit twice, which is still rarely enough later on, you can store extra energy, the problem is having enough to store. Now one might say that I could just build another unit to make solar energy. This is leads to issue two, the scale of the mission. By requiring a 300 mineral cost that item costs quite a bit. That by itself isn't that big of an issue but the next point is.

When one goes to build a new power station, it takes power to build it, which is somewhat ironic since if I really needed energy I wouldn't be making a station to get more of it. Sure I could build them sooner, however that would arguably lead to me being far more likely to fail a mission since enemy waves have a way of coming right after you make a major purchase.

Speaking of enemies lets move on to weapons, the basic laser is decent but even when fully upgraded can't take out a first wave enemy instantly, instead you watch a tiny bar slowly deplete and then watch it move to the next enemy, However if you don't have it fully upgraded they will swarm you cut off the path to it and then proceed to destroy the weapon if they can. To make matters worse the weapon itself has a ridiculously short range, it might work, but they have to get really close to do so.

You can upgrade to a longer ranged weapon which functions similarly to mushroom Revolution's sniper unit (long range, slower fire rate) However to upgrade to that you have to spend 6X the cost of a normal laser weapon, want another upgrade? well thats 800 more, and 1K for the last one. that is a total of 2,400 for one weapon vs. 650 for a fully upgraded laser, however I don't know which is better, since minerals are hard to come by when you need them so getting the 2.4K one is extremely hard to do.

The last of the weapons is missiles, which have an extremely long range, Are cheaper than long range lasers, but that require both energy and minerals. Not only that but it is completely useless against a type of enemy. The second most expensive to build and most expensive (arguably) to operate can't hit yellow ringers. This is the only type that has this restriction, sure some aren't very good against certain things, but lets look at those cases.

Swarmers: good- missles, bad - thels

Important distinction, thels do damage against swarmers

Motherships: good - missles, thels, bad - lasers

Important distinction, two actually, first lasers are the cheapest unit, second they are good against the fighters the mothership sends out.

Thus as said missiles have a huge flaw for reasons that fail to really be explained, why them and not the others? Is the fact that you have to tie up both sources of power not already bad enough?

This leads us into battle. First off there is no clue as to which way enemies will come from until they come from that way. since there is no way to know, it is literally impossible to set up a real defense against an attack until you know which way they will come from, now that would be okay if the game was built around that concept. Sadly it is instead far more likely that you will have to build out a bit to be able to best defend, each extension taking two to three seconds minimum to build, then once it actually gets the big thing built you have a level one weapon. To actually stand a chance you have to upgrade it, with any luck you will be against a glitch enemy or something that will wait for you to finish doing this, however I have yet to encounter such a creature. Now the question fans of the game will have, why not do all of this earlier? well thats were another flaw comes in.

The game is all about building out from a central position to gain resources and to complete a map, however in order to do that you have to build defensive areas to defend you when you are in a tiny area, then you have a huge expansion to get to the next set of resources, resources as mentioned before take forever to gather and once you do it is likely that you will have an enemy coming after you from a random impossible to guess ahead of time direction. In the unlikely case that it comes from a direction you are defended in you might be okay, but if it is from the new additions direction as typically happens you have a quick dash to set up some type of defense before the enemies get to you. Often to do so you have to use a few connectors to get to the battle field. While some may have telepathy I sadly lost that gift in an accident I don't care to go into. Even if one builds ahead of time the resources used to do that average out to about half a weapon or so, and minerals are once more time consuming.

Lets see what next...weapons, energy, minerals, scope of build, oh yes game play itself.

Did you want to play a game where you can tell things what to do and when to do them? Well then you went to the wrong place. In "The Space Game" you can place a few things on the map, wait for half a minute or so, place a few more things, maybe upgrade something, wait a while, maybe do something else. This is only slightly more fun than doing nothing at all. Assuming the boredom doesn't kill you,you have another huge thing to overcome. The game itself has 10 campaign levels and numerous other modes. That by itself could easily be dealt with...but there is a horrible truth to the game.

At the time of this post The Space Game had a 4.44 star rating on Kongregate.com. The game has 8822 votes which means that more than half of them had to have given it a 5. The Space Game is the third highest rated game on the site. Now it would be easy to write off up to around 500 of the five star votes off to escaped insane asylum inmates, but the rest of them are completely impossible for me to understand. The sheer number of 5s makes me wonder if I'm playing the same game as everyone else, but there would be no reason for that to not be the case. Due to its high rating it is only a matter of time before it gets badges, and I suspect an impossible badge for beating Mining Madness and surviving X minutes in No Hope Survival. This would fit in with almost every other game with an imp and the rating I gave this game is about what I gave most games that later ended up getting badged and getting imps.

Taking into consideration the sheer boredom, the weapon/resource flaws, the scope of which one must act, the random enemies that give you no time to prepare, and considering once again the boredom that makes watching paint dry seem like a good way to spend a day I had no choice but to award it a score worthy of all of these negative points

1/5

Ranting...done right

In response to the growing demand to see me rant for hours on end about games *cough*Amorphous+*cough* I have created this blog.