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| Infinite Space III: Sea of Stars by Mischief Maker 11/13/2015, 4:23pm PST | ||||
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| This was an obligatory purchase for me. Besides Oasis, Strange Adventures in Infinite Space is one of the main reasons I fell in love with indie gaming in the first place. The sequel, Weird Worlds, was more of a standalone expansion pack than a sequel, reusing many pieces of media and lore in a more robust engine. Infinite Space III: Sea of Stars is an equally incremental step forward, but while the changes aren't that big, they make some monstrous improvements to the gameplay.
It's a coffeebreak-length game where you have a limited amount of time to explore a randomly generated sector of space by jumping between stars. At each of these stars you will find at least one free piece of equipment or swag, but the star may also be occupied by aliens ranging from aggressively hostile, to insanely friendly. Combat is pausable real time where you position your ships and all your turreted weapons autofire at enemies in their firing arcs. The primary mission is to accumulate points by exploring the entire sector and grabbing everything not nailed down before the time limit runs out. This mission is hampered somewhat by the presence of the cloud nebula in this sector as any interstellar travel through the nebula slows your fleet to a crawl (assuming you don't have nebular drives). Sometimes there is an additional mission where you discover a malevolent alien threat to your homeworld that must be stopped or all will be lost, culminating in an epic boss battle. It's basically a shorter, faster, and much more charming version of FTL that's much lighter on the RNG. The original is now freeware, so give it a try and see why I love it so, warts and all. On to the changes: The most obvious change is the star map is now 3D and it's every bit as awkward to navigate as Sword of the Stars, to the point that some reviews say it ruins the game. I firmly disagree, because it solves a key problem of the two predecessors. Heavy nebula difficulty games used to be a case of "Where's the hyperdrive?" because your ability to travel was so limited, even if you did manage to squeeze a path around, all the resulting backtracking guaranteed you wouldn't see more than a third of the stars with conventional drives. On the 3D map nebula is still a major obstacle, but you almost always have multiple possible routes around the nebula with conventionals. Speaking of Hyperdrives, it's been needfully nerfed to require an entire year of charging per jump, making it no longer the "I win" button it was in the previous two games. Alien fleets are no longer static and sitting on planets waiting for you to show up. Space is now very busy with fleets moving to and fro, and planetary defense fleets grow over time, so you can get into scrapes early in the game and survive. Also, you can upgrade any ship hull at the homeworld for its race and better hulls appear over time. You can totally start out in a weak science ship, get a big hold full of weapons and booty, then drop by home and trade it in for a destroyer bristling with turret hardpoints. Combat is still 2D and instead of starting out arrayed at opposite ends of the screen, you can deploy any ship anywhere, at any time, so it's no longer the Urluquai who have all the fun with surround and pound tactics. Ship movement and facing control is much better with path dragging ala. Doorkickers instead of waypoints and facing orders. I believe ramming has been removed. One thing that's a little weird from a lore perspective, but I can certainly see as a "give them more of what they want" decision is that you no longer need to return to your homeworld before time's up. You can choose to quit no matter where you are, and you'll end up back at Lextor Mucron's space port to tally the reward instantly. It's another change that allows you to 100% a sector with conventional drives. Equipment now explicitly outlines its stats and takes the guesswork over whether THIS beam is any better than THAT beam. I have not yet collected a Particle Vortex Cannon, so I can't say whether they've balanced that to no longer be an automatic game-winner. On the downside, their art guy died after Weird Worlds, and the replacement guy's art isn't nearly as fun and colorful. Likewise, the flat-shaded polygon ships aren't nearly as pretty as the detailed sprites from the original (still miles better than FTL's graphics). Version 1.00 has a bug where sometimes when selling equipment, the equipment disappears forever and can't be re-bought. But only sometimes. I've also run into a lot more duplicate equipment in my runs than in the previous two games. In part because of the 3D map, the interface is way more awkward than its predecessors with giant screen-filling popups that can't be displayed side-by-side. Also, because the map is 3D, you can't take in the whole situation at a glance like in the previous games, which isn't great for something that's intended to be a coffebreak game. But all that aside, Infinite Space III is one of the greatest indie games of all time with its worst gameplay flaws fixed, a little extra content, and it's under ten bucks. I cannot recommend this game highly enough! |
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Infinite Space III: Sea of Stars by 11/13/2015, 4:23pm PST  |
