Fancy flying a cock-shaped spaceship around the place, rescuing people, delivering cargo and getting shot at by weird grey aliens until your space-cock explodes and you start all over again? Well as luck would have it, that pretty much sums up Space Crew, so let’s take a space-dive and see what’s what.
Space Crew has you commanding a team of six varied crewmates as you guide them to carry out various tasks in order to repair, fly, defend or otherwise keep your ship in tip-top shape. Initially it’s nice and calm, sending the right person to man the tractor beam, or asking the pilot to take you to the nearest moon, and so on. But before long you’ll be interrupted by phasmids – aliens that don’t take too kindly to you rocking up on their patch and hoping to share the enormity of outer space with them. So they’ll attack you. Sometimes they’ll beam themselves on board and start shooting things. All the while you’re trying to command your team to repair the shields, fly evasive manoeuvres, head to the door to protect against a visit… essentially, you’ll often need to do more than six things at once. Let the plate spinning commence!
Each of your crew has a specialism, providing you with improved abilities if the right person sits in the right seat. If you sit your engineer in the pilot’s seat, or ask your captain to fix the shields, you’re not going to get the most out of things. But what if the captain is already manning a weapon? Well, you either need to shift him back to the pilot’s seat or let someone else take the controls. Deciding whether to swap people round or leave them be and have a sub-par crew for a while is a tough call; do you want someone on the guns ASAP, or the right people for the job which might leave something else vital unattended? At some point you’ll make the wrong choice, and that’ll be the end. It will happen. It’s up to you to delay it for as long as possible…
Each time you complete a mission you can get hold of upgrades for your crew, or picking up new tech for the ship. This obviously lets you complete tougher missions for more reward, letting you upgrade more stuff, and so on. This is pretty much repeated throughout everything you do, and while it feels good knowing you’re improving things as you go, the fact that the missions get tougher as well sort of nullifies any advantages you might be getting. It doesn’t help that some of the enemies are incredibly hard to defeat, and with your targetting option basically being “shoot anything in this circle” you’ll be hard pushed to actually focus on one specific enemy that’s causing you particular grief.
But essentially these grips only come about if you’re playing it for long periods of time, and Space Crew is best served in smaller doses, just doing a couple of missions at a time. Playing it like this makes perfect sense, and means the smaller gripes down add up to much and leave you interested in playing more. You’re dealing with a space crew fighting aliens, and that in itself will be enough to grab the interest of a lot of people.
Reviewed on PS4 & PC
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