Astrox: Hostile Space Excavation

This little gem from 2015 worked well, in 2015. However, 7 years on it feels more like a tech demo for a much larger project. Which, once you find Astrox Imperium by the same developer, makes a lot a sense. It's fun for an hour or two, and I personally don't regret purchasing it. But in these days I'd steer people to the developer's much larger and more robust project.

I bought the game for under 4$ and i think it's an ok game but not worth since the newer game is better in every way even tho it's in early access.

If EVE had a Robin Reliant offspring then this would be it - smaller, more compact, a bit wobbly when taking a corner at high speed. Astrox: Hostile Space Excavation is a quirky little affair. Graphically, a mixed bag. The asteroids are flat, shaded affairs. To my mind, even the asteroids in Wing Commander 1, released in 1990, had more detailed asteroids than this game. But still, it's the gameplay that counts and Astrox:Hostile Space Excavation is pretty solid on that count. There are a good variety of ships, the mining is straightforward, easy and even relaxing (as long as you keep an eye on the proximity of enemy ships, but in practice, the odds are low that there flight path will bring them close enough that they detect you). The combat can be all set to auto - auto-targeting, auto navigation, and can be a case of just observing closely and only intervening if you need to escape. I can't remember how much I paid for the game - I suspect it was in a bundle some years ago. I'm not sure the current price tag (£7.18 in the U.K) is worth it, but it's a hard call. It's given me around 8 hours of fun before I decided to move on to other games. So there you go. If it's been in your Steam library for a while and you haven't got around to playing it, give it a whirl. You are likely to get some fun out of it.

Paid a few bucks for it. Was fun a bit over an hour until you realise it's just a "shoot, mine, sell, upgrade, go to next system, repeat" game. Doubt I'll play it again.

Astrox has a nearly non-existent plot line, and very little depth. Your character is a convict laborer in a space prison, which is somehow overrun with 100 pirate ships for every prisoner mining vessel. The only reason to grow more powerful is to mine asteroids faster and murderhobo through stronger pirate fleets. Every level is procedurally generated, and there is significant incentive to just farm pirate spawns instead of genociding them. When reaching the final level, your only option is to continue pointlessly or start over from level 0. The crafting system has 25 recipes, and is a huge sink of time and resources. Everything is geared around "numbers go up". Every time you warp to a new level, there is always an ambush by a huge mob of pirates, sometimes assisted by the mob of pirates waiting to ambush the warp-gate positioned nearby. There is no replay value. There isn't even any value in finishing one play-through. I am uninstalling and hiding the title in my library, so I don't forget and accidentally give it another try.

WOW! I just bought the bundle of ASTROX and how in the heck I missed these games ! I've been looking for something like this for the last 10 yrs. These games are a hidden jewel or better said, Masterpieces! They are the perfect version of EVE but offline. I'm having a blast with Hostile Space Excavation, What a game! can't believe that just one guy made them, KUDOS to him. Is sad to see that the developer decided to retire from making more video games, I'm pretty sure he got good reasons. To the Developer - Thank you Kind Sir for these games, my library will be on hold until I scratch that itch I've been suffering for years, or until I get tired of them, LOL. Thanks again and good luck in your new endeavors.

Awesome little game wish this guy had some extra help this game has the capabilities of being better then eve

This is a great little game. If you've ever played Eve Online this is like a pared down single player off-line version of that. It's a small download and works well.

Eve Lite/Solo, without the annoying PVPers killing the fun it is a fun relaxing game.

Finally got around to playing this one, and it's kinda underwhelming. It's a weird mix of a bunch of conflicting mechanics. None of them are bad individually, but the mixture doesn't help any of them. It's a arcadey space combat game with manual control of your ship, but your weapons are auto-target only and you can actually just auto-play the combat from a zoomed out perspective. It's a game where money is used as a leveling mechanic in that you can buy bigger ships and better gear for those ships, but you also have an XP system which feeds a level which earns a skill point which is only used to buy (with money and skill points) passive upgrades to your pilot. Neither of these are bad systems, but having two currencies seems unnecessarily limiting in this case. I played the game for nearly 20 hours, but a majority of that time is just clearing out all the asteroids and selling them in a system after destroying all the random pirate enemies that were slightly harder than the last one. I eventually died, because I pushed the combat a bit too far and blew up, and just kinda haven't had the urge to see if there's anything at the end if I managed to go through those last few systems. Not sure I'd buy this game anymore, but it was probably pretty decent at the time of it's release.