There’s a part of the video game portion of my brain that used to be dedicated solely to the notion that, in order to progress further and with relative ease, I must grind out experience, abilities, magic, money, or whatever else I needed. As I’ve gotten older this notion has slowly been eroded away into almost nothingness. For example, I simply don’t have the will to spend the hours upon hours of grinding through Final Fantasy XIII to make it through the various boss fights – fights which I engaged in time and time again and lost, until I finally resigned myself to grinding out the necessary levels and skills to beat them. Even then, I did the barest minimum of grinding every time because I just don’t enjoy that sort of gameplay anymore.
Having said that, Space Pirates and Zombies is fun despite the large amount of grinding required. The game is one long grind, wrapped up in a unique story and a variety of spaceships, weapons and augmentations – but it’s still a grind. If you can’t get behind the idea that you’ll be actively grinding through pretty much the entire experience, you may want to reconsider adding this to your list of things to play. If you can get behind that, read on after the jump.
[Update: Andrew Hume of MinMax Games had this to say: “We are doing our best to add more content, tune and reduce the feeling of grinding in the game. It is a tough balance because if we remove all of those choke points that really make you work to pass them, we also rob you of the great feeling when you do pass them. But we are working on it, and will hopefully some[sic] up with something even more rewarding.”
That sounds great, and he makes a very good point — passing those choke points leaves you feeling like you really did accomplish something. If you’re interested in a more in-depth look at the changes they are working on, take a gander at their patch notes.]
The story goes like this: Humans discovered a unique element, called Rez, which enabled them to master warp travel, and spread across the galaxy in search of more. They eventually spread out so far managing every single planet became impossible, every single planet split off from one another and the devices used to warp between worlds became locked down by the military. You come in as a group of pirates from Earth building a giant ship that can make it to the center of the galaxy where you’ve heard rumors that there is a limitless supply of Rez.
Basically you’re looking to get rich, as any self respecting pirate would be.
As soon as that is established you get thrown into the tutorial, which teaches you the basics – building and rebuilding ships, mining for Rez (money), recruiting Goons (workers), and collecting Data (experience). After you’ve gotten a grasp on the basics, the grind kicks in.
The first thing you realize is that Rez is super important – without it, you can’t rebuild destroyed ships, which leaves you massively crippled. Too often you will be engaged in a fight, destroy some of their ships, lose some of your ships, and be forced to rebuild them to finish the fight. It happens all the time, because chances are you’re doing missions in systems that are a higher level than you are. It’s not a bad thing if you have the Rez to rebuild your ships, but there will be points where you run out of Rez, be forced to retreat, and slowly start harvesting Rez to rebuild your ships and stock up a surplus.
The second thing you realize is that Goons are way, way more important than Rez. Goons are the crew of your ship; they rebuild your hull when you take damage and act as a currency in their own right. You can use Goons to buy a better reputation with factions in any given system, and follow that up by using them to bribe your way past a blockade, letting you move to the next planet without a fight. Reputation with factions is super important, because you need to meet specific levels of reputation to buy equipment from them. Your other option is to blow their space stations up, but that is near impossible early on in the game.
Where it gets tricky is you have a hard limit on how much Rez and Goons you can carry at any given point. So, for example, in the early game you have a full 100 Goons. You spend 40 to raise your reputation, then another 60 to pass the blockade. Suddenly you have none left, and should you lose a ship it will be rebuilt with no crew. It can still fight, but it may as well be crippled. So, naturally, you go back to doing random missions and events to build your Goons up again – only to repeat the process again and again.
What’s frustrating is that there is no way to increase those hard limits outside completing sections of the campaign. You could aimlessly explore the entire galaxy, do hundreds of missions, and level up time and time again and those limits will remain where they are until you return to the story – which means that despite this being a game centered around grinding, it is impossible to grind your way to an easier time of it.
The key here is that despite you grinding pretty much everything the game is incredibly addictive, thanks to the very active combat. Flying your ships is part tactical, in that you can open up a menu and assign specific targets to your fleet to fight, but mostly active. You physically fly your ship and decide how to fire your weapons, when to back away, and if you realize you’re outclassed, when to order a full retreat. You get to collect blueprints from the ships you destroy, reverse engineering those ships to add their designs and specialties to your fleet. As you progress through the story and hit systems with higher levels you come across bigger and more powerful ships, which take more blueprints collected to reverse engineer.
You want those ships.
Those ships represent bigger guns, better shields, and the ability go to back to the early systems that gave you a hard time and completely wipe them out. With those ships you can fly up to star bases that might have technology you just couldn’t get when you first visited them, cut through them like a knife through butter and take their technology, no spending required. Those ships also represent safety. For a long time you’ll only have one big ship able to be in your fleet, while you’ll be fighting many, many more than one of equal or greater power at any point.
There are so many elements to the combat that are so uniquely satisfying that the game keeps you hooked. One of my favorite things is when you’re in a head on fight with a ship and that is just wrecking you, but you’ve got their shields gone and have done some serious damage. You realize you’re about to get blown up, that you can’t get away from their weapons fire, so you pilot your ship directly at them, timing it so your ship explodes with them directly in that blast radius, and it takes them down with you. You can almost see your pilot flipping the enemy ship off as it explodes around him; a final ‘screw you’ to the dude that took him out.
What it boils down to is this: If you can get behind the fact that you’ll be grinding for the majority of the time, the rest of Space Pirates and Zombies is awesome. It’s fun playing it, the game looks great, and because it’s still a beta there’s always the chance some of the less desirable aspects of the game will get tweaked for the better. It’s an incredible demonstration of what a tiny indie team can accomplish on their own.
This preview was based on a download code provided by the developer, MinMax Games, with over 70 hours across two separate games played. A free demo is available from their website,or purchase of the beta is available from Impulse.
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