Star Trek Wars
I’ve been a science fiction fan for as long as I can remember; so it was no surprised that when my mom introduced me to William Shatner’s Captain Kirk in my youth and then the prime years of TNG I feel in love with them instantly. Then a few years later my friends all were watching Star Wars and a new Sith was born (look…I’m being honest…id probably be on their side) So when I heard about Space Crew’s Legendary Edition update my interest was immediately peaked.
In Space Crew the player basically works for Starfleet, but is called the UDF here and they are at war with a species of alien known as Phasmids. Being at war, leads to lots of conflicts during every mission; Initially the early missions consist of clearing enemy ships, or rescuing people. All of them will teach the player the basics of controlling the crew and spaceship. Each crew member has special abilities that can be invaluable during a mission, these can range from the gunners having ‘Focus Fire” which will improve their accuracy to having the engineer overload the generator which will allow for more power to be allocated to various systems.
MSRP: $24.99
Platforms: Xbox (reviewed), PC, Switch, PlayStation
Price I’d Pay: $24.99
Once the player moves on to the medium risk missions the training wheels come off and everything is more challenging. Enemies will be more difficult and players will need to use their crew skills more actively for success. Space Crew features a permadeath system; and while players will get a new ship their 6 crew members will be lost forever. That includes all the skill points, and armor and anything they might have had equipped; players will quickly learn that space is cruel, cold mistress.
It doesn’t take long before Space Crew will truly test the captain’s ability to multitask; and I don’t mind telling you that I became overwhelmed on more than one occasion. As players progress the campaign missions will get harder, but the number of things that is required of them to juggle is increased as well. So, the main crew consist of a Captain, who steers the ship, Security who can purge areas of the ship to put out fires in a pinch or expel unwanted guests into the cold vacuum of space. There is an Engineer who fixes things, a Comms officer who scans areas and two Gunners. It will not be uncommon to have to decide to pull a Security officer off their post and assign them to repelling enemy boarders. But in doing so players will lose his ablitiy to purge areas where there may be a fire because they are being fired on by enemy vessels. Oh and the Captain was killed in that last volley.
That’s not an overstatement, this legit happened to me on one of my runs, now was I upset; sure, but I still had a great time. And I learned from the mistake and made it past that part on the next go round, that’s the beauty of Space Crew. While it can be extremely difficult at times, it manages to exert its will over the player in order to pull that old “one more game…” out of us. The only thing I didn’t like about Space Crew was the grind, in order to be successful in the game players will need to get better gear. And that becomes even more apparent when playing the Android Invasion expansion.
This brought a whole new campaign, as well as legendary crew members and ground missions. While the campaign is fun, it does not contain a tutorial so the game advises players to play through the original content first. The legendary crew members add another element for players to grind to achieve; they are quite useful in play in they come with unique abilities to use on ground and in space. For me though, the best part about the expansion was the ground missions. While simplistic in nature, you literally just kind of tell the guys where to go and they shoot when needed; it added the missing layer from an already very fun experience. Visiting those strange new worlds was always fun on TV and it’s a fun and rewarding experience in Space Crew as well.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
