Space Crew Review
As America gets closer and closer to election day, I believe attitudes will become more strained and aggressive and we’re sure to get more bad news as the day approaches. Things were certainly bad this week. The worst news to come out of the past seven days was the killing of one black teen and the severe injuring of another at the hands of Illinois police officers. On top of that, police in New York confiscated important health safety gear being distributed for free to voters at one of the state’s early voting locations. Most insidiously, it was revealed to the nation that a school in Ohio was using videos from a right-wing propaganda factory as part of their class curriculum. As this continues, I hope everyone is doing what they can to support and advocate for those most vulnerable to fascist actions, whether they’re state-sanctioned or not. But for right now, we all need something to help us escape from our nightmare reality for a while, so let me talk to you about Space Crew.
Space Crew tells the story of the crew of a United Defense Force starship fighting against an alien invasion. The Phasmids, conquerors from beyond our galaxy, have set their eyes on Earth for an unknown reason and are dedicating the full force of their military to destroy our world. In response, the UDF deploys their most elite starship, in my case The Hand of Pluto, to repel the invaders. As the crew persists in their mission against the Phasmids, they will learn new skills to combat the alien menace and the ship will gain new equipment and armaments. Additionally, the crew will suffer terminal fates in their fight against the Phasmids, including being blown up, ejected out an airlock, poisoned by radiation, set on fire, suffocated, obliterated by a black hole, and being shot by Phasmid intruders, and the ship can be lost in exactly as many ways. When this happens, the UDF will deploy a new crew and/or ship that everyone agrees was actually the best crew and/or ship the whole time, not those other, dead ones.
Space Crew exists on an axis I never knew existed. This game has nestled itself halfway between Roller Coaster Tycoon and FTL: Faster Than Light. Like in FTL, the player is put in charge of the entire ship, directing where crew should move, how power is distributed throughout the ship, which armaments the ship will have, and more. But, more like Roller Coaster Tycoon, the player doesn’t always have control over the fine details of what the ship and crew does and instead has to rely on the AI brains of their crew. One of the main examples of this is fighting other ships. Despite the ship having several windows, crew in the gunner pods won’t attack any enemies until they are targeted, or “painted,” by the player. At that point, each crew member will decide which enemy in their effective range to fire upon, sometimes not aiming for the foe the player would prefer. The same is true for putting out fires onboard the ship or repelling hostile boarders. There are also functions of the ship that require appropriate stations on the ship to be staffed, a limitation not present in games like FTL. If the player wants to divert power from the engines to the shields, the player must first make sure a crew member is sat at the engineer terminal. Similarly, if the player wants to instruct their crew to abandon ship and get to the escape pods, someone must be at the captain’s helm. To me, this made it feel much more like commanding real people than the silent, proficient automatons found in FTL. At times, playing Space Crew felt like playing Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator with friends without having to go to the trouble of organizing the schedules of six people.
As players move through the game’s campaign, their ship and crew will change and improve through the acquisition of experience, research, and credits. Experience is earned by defeating enemies and improves a crew member’s proficiency with their assigned jobs in two ways: small but persistent improvements in performing their tasks, and new skills that can temporarily heighten or change their capabilities for a short time. This means when a Captain gets enough experience to level up, they will forevermore pilot better, meaning the ship is harder for enemies to hit, and will also learn a new skill that makes the ship so evasive it’s impossible to be hit for several seconds. The skills earned are a mixed bag, with the Gunner and Engineer being dull as dirt but the Captain, Security, and Communications Officer skills being fun and creative. Research and credits are earned by completing missions and completing side objectives. Players spend credits to purchase new or improved weapons and equipment for the ship and crew, while research is used to unlock newer, more interesting weapons and equipment for the player to spend their credits on.
I was mostly impressed but slightly frustrated with this system. I liked being able to outfit my ship and crew how I wanted, such as placing a plasma cannon on the port side of my ship because a surprisingly high percentage of enemies attack from that angle and plasma cannons peel shields away from enemy vessels comically fast. However, this system felt incomplete because the effects of most equipment is barely explained, players are only given the potential new purchase’s stats in a combination of a number and an unexplained symbol. I know that a rail gun has a higher number next to the crosshair symbol than the plasma cannon, but I have no idea about the effective ranges of both weapons or how their damage is adjusted depending on if they hit a target with or without shields. Another problem is that players aren’t able to spend research on what new items they can unlock. Instead, once their research amounts hit certain thresholds, one or more specific items are unlocked. I wanted to unlock better rail guns and particle beams, not waste my time researching gravity generators that are a bit harder to break. The same is true for the crew equipment. I liked that I was able to buy my engineer special magnetic boots so they could walk on the exterior of the ship to fix the engines and not have to worry about being thrown into the void of space by my captain’s evasive maneuvers, but I wasn’t able to unlock those boots until I’d had my research points being devoted to armor-plated work gloves. It frustrated me to have the potential to craft my perfect ship and crew restricted by having to follow someone else’s ideas of priority.
Games like Space Crew are the reason I do my yearly Russell Revisits articles every December. There’s a lot to like in this game but enough went wrong that I can’t give it my full recommendation. I think anyone who buys it will have fun with it, especially those who like to manage chaotic action, but I think it would be better to wait for the developers, who seem to be doing a great job listening to fan feedback, to make some changes. As of now, $20 seems high to me.
Buy this game on sale
It’s worth playing, just not at the price they’re asking
Updated as of 12/19/2020: Buy this game at full price
It’s worth every penny they’re asking
