Space Pirate King Reviews

Space Pirate King is an indie Japanese game that shows some promise, but in the end, is not polished enough to be enjoyable, even as bargain bin material. I start the game, and was immediately blasted with some high tempo rock music, that I had to turn down by looking for the option menu. I clicked on tutorial, where I was told to "test your battleship". Then I realized I don't have the controls. So I went into the config and try to map the controls... Except I have no idea what I'm looking at, as there's no way to tell if I'm looking at mapping keys or controller buttons. This is complicated by the fact that Steam tries to interject its own controller mapping as well which I have to undo. Eventually got enough controls to work by remapping the buttons. Okay, it's a flat-plane 3D (Rebel Galaxy, Starfleet Command) where left stick controls the speed of ship and turning, the four buttons can be mapped to to weapons, shields, and special, and the right stick maps to the secondary turrets. Okay, got that figured out. So I need to blast a hulk for practice, then a ship for real, Okay, so far so good. Then I was hit by some sort of long-range fire, and I don't see where it's coming from (from far away), so I hit shield up, and tried to run away. After about 10 seconds, I blew up. Kaboom. "You died." start over... Huh? So I find a screen with additional menu choices like outfit and "shop". Hmmm... Outfit is a ship builder where you can take the parts you built or looted and put them onto your ship, subjecting to some limits. Depending on your luck what you destroy in tutorial may drop some parts. Drag them onto the ship to link, subject to limits. Shop is where you can use "gold" to buy certain elite parts. As you start with only 10 gold, there's not much you can afford. So I tried clicking around, and died a couple more times in the tutorial. I did get my shields up, and I tried warp, neither kept me alive any longer than before, so wasn't sure what the game was trying to "teach" me. The parts seem to be named after various scifi franchises. "dimensional wave drive" "impulse engine" "plasma rifle" and so on. Tried to escape to main menu, but nothing seems to work. Somehow I got a "mining" mission, where I practice my gunnery on asteroids, and grab "resources", so I kept doing and got like 15 until I got bored. Then I found the components menu had an additional bit called "build". I tried dragging an existing part, then a unit of resource, and I created a new part. I dragged two resources to the build, and created a turret. I tried a couple other combinations, just for fun, basically. But not much else can be built without more parts. And I still can't find the choice to quit the game. It's not under options, nor is there a main menu that I can escape to. Eventually I had to ALT-F4 the game. All in all, SPK is a concept, that's not really ready for prime time, at least not without some major revisions in documentation and/or UI.