Approaching Infinity Reviews

The gameplay is too monotonous

yeah get this game thanks

Excellent game. Get it.

I liked Approaching Infinity but I think it likely suffers from too great a vision for what was presumably a small or solo dev team. The game is divided into two parts and I'll provide some thoughts on both to help people interested in details assess if it's for them, but the TLDR for people wanting it is that I believe the focus on giving the game an "expansive" feel came at the cost of what's actually there being bland and samey. One can see the effort overall but when you get down to the details it's hard to not notice the lack of resolution and richness. It's therefore worth picking up if you're actively looking for a time sink or just really like the concepts but just bear in mind it's not a game you want to delve to deeply into, the faster you try breeze through the variety of what's on offer the more you'll be playing to its strengths. OK so let's get down to nuts and bolts. The first part of this game is space exploration: you warp your ship between sectors and then navigate around them in a rudimentary sort of tiled TBT battlefield. You can dock in stations to pick up supplies, find quests and engage in basic space commerce. On that note the space commerce was one of the highlights of this game and I was sad to see it also felt the least fleshed out. You outfit your ship with new weapons, armour, shields, utility and officers who provide special abilities, craft any stuff you feel like from your inventory and replenish nondescript "crew" whose purpose I never figured out in 30+ hours of game time beyond occasionally being told they died and needed replacing. The second part are "away team" missions: littered throughout the sectors are planets and shipwrecks that you can dock in or send a landing pod down to have a look around with your team, fulfilling quest requirements from space, finding loot and utilizing a very different set of items and officer abilities. You also find by far the best crafting parts during these missions; that's an incentive that links them to space operations and a nice design touch. As to ship life in space, there is basic combat people will be familiar with from innumerable TBT games, fairly barebones but not bad. There's nothing real time so no aiming or the like, just tab through targets and fire, but personally I quite liked that, games try to be something they're not is annoying and a roguelike exploration game didn't need some hokey half-assed arcade game thrown in, so I approve of the fact that here there is no such thing. Your ship has up to 3 different weapons and you can outfit various devices for capabilities but sadly they are mostly statistical in nature and play fairly similarly. The space combat therefore feels fairly generic, mostly just focused on the use of officer abilities which definitely saved the day in terms of gameplay interest, but otherwise just cycling through the same 2 - 3 weapons. I feel a major missed opportunity here was not allowing ships to outfit many many more weapons but just making each of them less powerful; really when you're limited to 3 weapons max it's pretty hard to pick up utility over a third of your DPS. All in all you have enough buttons to press for it to be pretty fun and I mostly found there was enough danger to keep things interesting. The space part was therefore all good, although the difficulty did have issues of too much unpredictability at times. Let's now talk the second part, the "Away Team" exploration of planets. Here we find the greatest microcosm of Approaching Infinity's strengths and weaknesses. You land your shuttle and explore, this time much closer to a traditional roguelike dungeon crawler feel. You've outfitted your team with weapons boasting different damage types and you learn to make sure you are bringing the right tools for the job and avoid running into immunities you can't deal with. You pick up a bunch of loot and for so long as you care about the overall arch of the wider game and still care about improving your ship, finding new gear and making more money, these missions retain a good level of interest. Your officers again have special abilities and they tend to be powerful enough to be interesting. The only problem, and it's not a small one, is that holy cow are the worlds themselves are very generic and boring. All the classic problems of procedural generation are here to a tee, a huge volume of undifferentiated tiles and mobs, an extremely limited selection of objects and just generally no flair. For so long as you care about the loot for the space side, however, you can overlook the flaws. So all told you're having a good time. The game's individual elements are a bit nondescript but the sheer variety of things to do, from trading to planet exploration to space combat, you haven't really noticed yet that the individual elements are not offering anything other games with clearer focus don't do better individually. The problems only begin to set in once you've mastered the games disparate elements enough that quantity no longer tricks your brain into overriding lack of quality. Space trading becomes boring because it's too simple: the number of commodities is far too low, their price fluctuations too basic, and most importantly pretty rapidly the game hits the classic game economy problem of money becoming worthless. You can before long by far and away make better equipment crafting than what is encountered in shops and at that moment suddenly the entire space commerce element of the game - hitherto its best most fun part - suddenly feels irrelevant because you're drowning in money and don't care about its reward. It's around about this time you also begin to notice the planetary exploration is boring you. You run around collecting loot only to remember that unlike earlier you don't care about the commodities because you have nothing to spend money on because what you can buy is never as useful as what you can craft anyway. So why were you doing this again? Ah yes, that's right, to get those crafting essences! You get dope crafting parts from the exploration, and they're parts you can't really get anywhere else in big numbers. So that sustains you for awhile longer, but before long you've pretty much crafted what you wanted to and it begins to feel there's not much point continuing - it's all just bigger number equivalents of exactly where you're already at, the same gear with bigger numbers to match the same enemies with bigger numbers in faraway sectors that will feel much the same, and it's at this moment that it occurs to you that you might have found yourself on a fairly pointless grind treadmill. You wonder if "Approaching Infinity" was actually a title deliberately chosen to laugh at you as a player for wasting your time. Guess it's time to wrap things up now. OK so now this maybe sounds a tad harsh. Why do I recommend it then? Well because I think the end point of my experience was my own fault. I spent too much time min-maxing, getting ALL the pointless loot and trading to fat cat status without questioning why. Had I done what was required in each zone and moved on, stuck to a clear quest line, I don't doubt I would have had fun to one end or another rather than simply losing interest. Approaching Infinity's main flaw in my mind therefore was that it didn't make sure to light a fire under me to to help me reject my worst instinct to play in such a way as to bore myself. That's on me, sure, but a creeping threat that slowly made earlier sectors unreachable, or perhaps some more to do with big money in game, I think would have gone a long way. I recommend, just bear in mind this is an open game and it's a mistake to not keep things moving. I think if you play this title with this advice in mind, you will avoid the trap that I did.

This is a great game. You can tell the dev team put maximum effort into this. Lots of polish, lots of care. Easy purchase for anyone who likes the genre. The only ding really I can give would be the art style. The UI in general is very good. Easy to play, intuitive. Tons of icons for skills and items. The icons are.. alright. Not amazing, but not bad. Characters portraits, away team, monsters, ships, stations aren't great. Probably the weak point of the game. They are fairly silly. Improving these would increase immersion and overall feel. Personally I'm here for the mechanics and give this game a full score.

Truly deserves to be counted among the best in it's genre. Surprisingly intuitive and accessible while being suitably complex and challenging. It feels like it was made for someone like me. It's captured my imagination and my attention for many hours to come.

I was put off at first when I saw the art style, but man Approaching Infinity delivered for me in spades. It feels like a refreshing cool drink made with modern mechanics, simple and well explained systems, and the refined essence of that old nostalgic PC game you played on that Windows 98 in your 2nd grade math class. After nearly 20 hours, I only wish the game had more to partake in. Normally games have too much breadth and not enough depth, but this game has the opposite problem. Fantastic depth and I want more content to play, which is a fantastic feeling to have about a game. Sorry for a bit of a tangent here, but THANK YOU for having every single stat on every single item simply explained with no complex formula. I know EXACTLY how much better any item is than any other, and I don't need a whole fandom wiki to figure out how anything works. Every system is simple, fun, and works exactly as expected.

I've become addicted to this game in the short amount of time that I've played it. It's a long, deep, quest-driven space roguelike game. But keep in mind, that like some other modern rogue-like games, that permadeath is optional. The early game is fairly simple and straight-forward, allowing you to learn the basics before being plunged into the deep-end. You can explore space, planets, wrecked spacecraft, caves, and so on. You start with a choice of captain, a basic ship and unnamed crewmembers. Eventually, you can recruit officers, unlock new starting ships and captain's backgrounds (kind of like specializations), so there is a progression beyond the individual games. Specializations include trader, operative, scientist, diplomat, and so on. The game isn't all that challenging until you get past the first couple of sectors. You can play as a trader, a pirate, an explorer, and so on. Different Captains are rewarded more based on their specialization. You can engage in diplomacy, side with different factions, and so on. There's an optional crafting system that allows you to craft consumables and upgrade your gear and ship components. All in all, even in early access, I can heartily recommend this game.