Space Mercs Reviews

This game is only for a very specific kind of person to play, I have to assume the designer. First, it's a light space shooter, a way to kill time while listening to something. Second, due to the difficulty, there's a sense of mastery gained because you really do have to get good at this old school hard game. Flight is extremely bare-bones: you can slowly accelerate or decelerate and reverse, or jump to top speed or brake instantly, and you aim with the WASD keys, not the mouse. There is control mapping, but it has a tendency to switch back to defaults without warning. The two special moves are boosting which is strangely used for precise aiming control, and the dodge roll which doesn't seem to prevent damage but is useful to avoid smashing into other ships at the last moment. Weapons use energy to fire and consist of either a selection of primaries to buy, or one dumbfire missile that will only hit with luck or from close range. The primary weapons start with a free pew-pew laser and go up to an expensive shotgun-like railgun which feels like shooting a bunch of light chaff. In the story mode, you start as the new hire for a gunship mercenary group. The story, which is relayed in emails, is a decent sci-fi merc saga where the group's leaders work for governments against pirates, then see a chance to claim territory and settle down, but forget or underestimate the remaining strength of the enemies they made along the way, so end up losing the territory. After beating all the missions, you unlock two modes: a Quick Battle in the main menu which throws you against increasingly larger waves until you die, and a bare-bones Designer where you can create a single wave battle with up to 500 each small, medium and heavy fighters plus battleships on both sides (for a max of 2000 vs 2000 which might melt your computer) and you can choose the background color … sadly these battles don't end when you defeat all enemies, which feels anticlimactic. That's about it for recommending the game. The only healing comes from very expensive parts with slow auto hull repair, there's no mission checkpoints, no depth to the fights, just hardcore basic space combat. The vibe is cold and sterile, weird and spacey but not in a fun way. Enemy and ally ships are not dynamic in action, more like small asteroids that shoot back. Many of the story levels feel exactly the same: two or more waves of enemy ships to destroy with short breaks between. Only the back half of the levels have any new objectives, which are just to destroy stationary targets. As the levels get too tough for your starter ship, you'll want to go back and repeat the levels you can beat a bunch of times to make enough money to buy incredibly expensive ship upgrades, so the game ends up feeling very grindy and like they're inflating the length. Some problems seem like actual bugs. A strange aspect of the level scoring system (the money you get for winning) is that the mission time includes the previous times (since you last started the game) so you start getting a lot less money if you play longer. There's only one volume control, you can't individually adjust music or effects, and you have to reapply the lower volume each time you start the game. In a mission where your main duty is to protect a transport ship, I saw it blow up after an enemy spawned next to it, but I still won after killing all the enemy. Overall, this is not a fun game unless you enjoy difficulty, it's short unless you want to spend a while in the Quick battles, and even then you should only buy this on sale. It should be free.