Space Pirates and Zombies Preview
The history of space games has been a difficult and rocky one, filled with brilliant games over the years, but also speckled with missed potential and yearning for old franchises left long dead. Few new games even pretend to bring back those glory days, but one has really caught my attention. It's called Space Pirates and Zombies, also known as SPAZ, by a little two-man team called MinMax Games. I'm not positive that MinMax can rekindle that same love of the old space strategy games with SPAZ, especially since it starts out as much more of an action game, but the potential is most certainly here.
SPAZ is built on the Torque engine, which has some very low system requirements, but it's not terribly impressive technology as everything is represented in a few 2D planes layered on top of each other. Still, the two-man team at MinMax have put together some solid art and some surprisingly impressive special effects to make SPAZ look quite good, and the game even manages to run on a netbook.
You start out with a non-controllable mothership that serves as your headquarters for the game, and after a little, er, mishap, you've got to get out in a tiny lifeboat-type ship to salvage a few things to keep your home base from exploding. The ship you're piloting stays in the center of the screen, and moving the mouse cursor both aims at enemies and dictates where your ship is pointing. WASD are your keys for movement, and those are relative to where you point with the on-screen cursor. This takes getting used to, since you always have to keep in your mind what key does what. Firing is done with mouse buttons, and advanced controls can be set up for firing bays of guns separately. You'll be in control of more than one ship, and an AI profile takes over for any ship you're not controlling directly, although the number keys swap you around at any point. It's one part Master of Orion, one part Star Control 2 - with a few extras mixed in.
Before long, you'll have a couple of ships in your roaming fleet that putter around out in the Sol system performing little missions for Rez, the magical mineral that you collect and then spend to create new ships and buy parts. There are two competing factions around each star system, the Civilians and the UTA, and performing missions for either side improves your relations - and most missions involve blowing up one side's ships (ruining your reputation with that side) in order to gain favor with the other. Each system has the same UTA/Civ conflict, but each system also has no idea of your standing in other systems, so you can be best buddies with the UTA in one place, and bitter enemies in the next. Your ships are crewed from your supply of Goons, which are sourced from the escape capsules from exploding ships as well as through paying Rez to hire them at space stations. You can choose just how much "surplus crew" you draw from your Goons supply, and these guys will help repair damage to your ships on the fly, but you'll also lose them if your ship explodes.
Each destroyed enemy ship leaves behind little data capsules, which act like experience points out of any RPG. Yep, you level up in this game, and those points are poured into improving all of your ships' technology across the board. Shields, armor, lasers, missiles, engines, power plants, and more can be pumped up along with the money you put into buying blueprints for new weapons and the new ship designs you reverse-engineer from blowing up any ship type that's not already in your library of blueprints. All of this probably makes it seem like SPAZ is a complex, menu-driven game, but it's not; here and there you can pause the game and enter tactical view to order whatever ships you're not piloting to attack something, you'll drop back to the star map often to jump to a new location, you'll level up once in a while, and pop by a starport to possibly buy a new weapon, but most of your time is spent actually doing missions and taking out enemies in real time.
The goal of the game is to make it to the center of the galaxy for a massive payday, but in doing so you will release the Zombies, which in SPAZ are a major threat, even to high-powered starships. In fact, they're much tougher to deal with than either the UTA and civilians. Their ships have unique weapons that can infect yours and send zombies aboard to wipe out your crew and turn your ship into an enemy. Your only recourse is to vent all living things out of the airlocks to eradicate the infection. This whole system is currently frustrating and difficult to deal with, but you can at least feel save with the knowledge that it will be many hours into the game before you have to deal with them in huge numbers. You'll go through many new ships, powerful weapons, and upgrades before you come across your first serious Zombie infection.
While you'll notice that this is article is a preview, the game is being distributed in a Minecraft-style way: by delivering gameplay to buyers right now and getting people spread the word about how fun it is; the developers are hoping to make money on the game while it's still unfinished in order to fund continued development. I have no numbers as to whether they're succeeding or not, but I do have to say that even in its current state, SPAZ has given me many more hours of fun than I've gotten out of most games. The addictive RPG-like systems that let players progress and build bigger and better ships (and equip them with cool new toys) are maddeningly difficult to pull myself away from, and while there are plenty of problems with the game, none are deal-breakers.
That said, we should probably go through a few of those problems. First, the buddy ship AI is generally pretty dumb, and will charge forwards into battle no matter the situation. Sure, it will assist you on your target and fire its weapons effectively, but it won't run away when it's hurt - even though the enemy AI will do that often. It'll also senselessly prioritize the killing of any person that's been airlocked out into space over collecting vital materials left on the battlefield post-fight, and in doing so, it'll often accidentally destroy viable escape capsules that you could still pick up.
On top of this, some of the missions need tweaking; there are a few types that are difficult or fiddly to complete, and one is just completely impossible to finish. Finally, the game's difficulty is generally just pretty steep overall, although the way that galaxies are randomly generated and purchasable upgrades randomly peppered throughout might contribute an unpredictability that makes some generated maps easier or harder than others. One of the biggest features I can suggest MinMax work on would be a difficulty setting or slider; what it's at now might suffice well as a Hard mode, with Easy and Normal below it and maybe two more above it.
It's poor form to put a review score on any game that's not deemed officially complete by its creators. Officially, this is still a preview, but I have played SPAZ for dozens of hours and I'm completely enamored with the game's ability to combine strategy and action into such a charming space sci-fi game - and the low system requirements only make it more enticing. I wouldn't expect this game to be a millions-selling runaway success like Minecraft has been, but I'd be terribly upset if SPAZ doesn't keep these guys in business long enough to start another project after this one is officially released.
Space Pirates and Zombies is available for "pre-order" over on GamersGate for $15, but a purchase gets you a key to play the current pre-release version (as of this writing, Beta 0.9.007) right now. On the other hand, if you're not ready to commit your fifteen bucks just yet, a demo allows you to play for 90 minutes. If your enjoyment of space games included titles like Master of Orion or Star Control 2, then you owe yourself the time it takes to at least give SPAZ a shot.
