Galactic Crew

[h1]OVERVIEW[/h1] Galactic Crew is the debut title from solo indie developer, Benjamin Rommel Games. Galactic Crew lets you take on the role of a space pirate or trader of your own choosing, dropped into a small space ship in a procedurally generated galaxy, and left to fend for yourself. As a pirate you earn credits and renown by, well, acts of piracy. Destroy enough ships -- civilian and pirate -- and an overpowered law-abiding nemesis will spawn and chase you about the galaxy, homing in on your position like a spacey bloodhound. As a trader you, um, trade. Earn enough money and again an overpowered nemesis will spawn and track you down, in this case a pirate. In the current Early Access state of the game I'm not entirely sure whether the game has a goal or if you're just supposed to wander around the galaxy until you get bored or die. [h1]Graphics[/h1] The graphics in Galactic Crew seem to be rendered in 3D, but the camera has a fixed angle, with only panning and zooming supported. Panning is sometimes jumpy and erratic. The ships are the graphical highlight of the game. They look really quite good at first, but there are only four of them and the graphics are largely static, with only few visible changes as you play. The rest of the game seems to feature programmer art quite heavily. Character models are bland and uninteresting. Animations are reasonable, but not very varied. You can choose a model for your character when you first start the game, but they all look basically the same, with the same animations. Weapon effects are minimalist and disappointing: thin coloured lines with no special effects or visible damage. The interface is only partly explained and sometimes unclear. Ship components, though very few in number, don't have tooltips and mostly have no obvious effects; it took me half an hour of pressing buttons and searching menus before I worked out that you need to walk a character into the teleporter manually to board an enemy ship in combat. [h1]Sound[/h1] The few music tracks are okay, but mostly forgettable: a range of short, repeated electronic tunes with a minimalist feel, ideal for background music. Sound effects are very basic, with a couple of different weapon sounds and little else. The tutorial is fully voiced and there are a number of spoken status messages in the game, such as when a system is destroyed. This is a nice idea and the audio quality is surprisingly good, but the voices themselves seem amateurish and out of place. [h1]Gameplay[/h1] Galactic Crew plays similarly and is obviously heavily influenced by FTL, but it is inferior in basically every way; comparing the two is an exercise in disappointment for the Galactic Crew player. Each time you start a new game a new galaxy is procedurally generated. This itself is a bit disappointing, as there are so few elements that every game ends up basically the same anyway: a few space stations, one shipyard, and a number of other nodes of two different types, asteroid belts or "solar systems".  Space stations allow you to retrofit modules and systems to your current ship and to trade from the small array of goods available; shipyards allow these same actions, adding the ability to buy a new ship from the four available; asteroids allow mining for resources, if you have a mining laser; and solar systems provide random encounters. Ship layouts are extremely restricted, so retrofit choices essentially boil down to whether you want a teleporter or a shield and whether you can spare the crew/officer space for a hydroponic module, to save on food. Once you can afford the most expensive ship you no longer even need to make the choices; you can simply have everything. Trading is limited, too. Every station seems to have the same prices for all goods, or very nearly so, and there's no practical differences in any of the trade goods except for food and energy crystals, which you'll probably end up mostly keeping for your own use anyway. The rest may as well just be removed and replaced with a generic "Trade Goods" placeholder. Asteroid mining doesn't seem to work, or at least I couldn't manage to do it, even with the engineer background. That leaves the random encounters, which one might expect to provide variation and replayability as in FTL, but which actually all devolve into four situations: nothing, combat, planetary exploration, or betting food or energy on potential gain. The first of these is straightforward: sometimes nothing of interest happens, or nothing you can do, anyway. Combat is rudimentary. You select a character, select you weapon or weapons, and target an enemy ship component. Enemy weapons are never destroyed before the hull is reduced to zero, so there's basically no tactical targeting. Meanwhile your enemy is attacking you, so you assign your other characters to repair the module being targeted. If you have a teleporter and you can work out how to use it then you can also teleport characters onto the enemy ship, but mostly you don't need to bother. I loved FTL's combat. I have trouble staying awake in Galactic Crew's. Planetary exploration sounds like a great idea, but as with combat it's rudimentary and boring. You teleport to the surface, wander around an extremely small map, pick up some resources, and leave. It's disappointing in the extreme. It's also very laggy to pan the view. Finally, the remaining encounters let you help someone, explore a derelict, or similar. These either devolve into combat or consume food or energy to give you a random bonus: a crew member, salvaged resources, or nothing. There's little variation and little of interest. Add to this lack of interesting content a number of annoying bugs and the game really doesn't seem very appealing at the moment. The worst I've seen are the exceptions (crashing the game) and broken in-game achievements. The price is also way too high for the content available, especially when you consider FTL's regular and sale prices. [h1]PROS AND CONS[/h1] Pros: + Some good ideas ... Cons: - ... implemented very poorly: boring combat, rudimentary AI, lack of content, ... - Buggy - Overpriced [h1]CONCLUSION[/h1] I was really excited to have a chance to play Galactic Crew, but so far I've been disappointed. It's a bare-bones FTL clone with boring combat, limited tactics, and repetitive gameplay. Even though it's in Early Access I can't bring myself to recommend it, especially at the asking price. Play FTL again instead. A S L P [h1]Quit[/h1] R [code]For more game reviews, visit [url=http://saveorquit.com/]Save or Quit[/url].[/code]

This looks like a promising idea. Currently, there is basically not a game here. I do not think this product is ready to be in early access yet. You can see how there is the basic framework for an interesting title. But it has a way to go before it's redy to show the public.

No. Just NO. Not in it's current state. Not for the price. This isn't just early alpha, this is barely out of dev build. The screenshots above misrepresent the quality of graphics overall. Yes, the screenshots make it look interesting, but from what I was able to access due to bugs, these are static - I can't provide more info simply because bugs. There are inconsistencies with gui and menus. There are glitches in the settings: unable to adjust resolution, full screen options!? The pitch seemed promising, the screenshots enticing enough to buy the game. I can't decide if I'm disappointed in Benjamin Rommel, creator of this game (the ingame youtube link takes you to his channel, not a specific Galactic Crew channel), or irritated that he's pitched this in it's current state. This is shoddy, and it doesn't matter if you label it 'Early Access', that's no excuse for the lack of quality going on here. Does it have potential? Quite frankly, I've lost interest because there is such a disparity between the pitch & product that cannot be resolved now. YMMV

I have a lot of fun playing this game. When you start a new game, you pick a ship, a character race and class, and some cards that affect gameplay. For instance one card makes pirates not beam on board, another adds a storyline, and another makes missions pay more. As you complete achievements you unlock new cards and ships to bring into each new game. There's 3 starts, merchant, pirate, and explorer. In addition to affecting starting conditions, it affects how you generate threat. This causes difficult enemies to spawn and hunt you. Or you can pick the explorer start and remove that from your game. It this game if you die or run out of fuel, it's game over. Erased save and everything. However you can choose to save your captain and carry him into a new game. So even if you lose, you don't lose everything. You keep your character's progression and can pick new cards to use in his next life. This game is still in Early Access so there are some bugs that come with that. But the dev updates the game and fixes those that the players report pretty regularly. For instance I reported a bug with one of the new achievements yesterday and a few hours later it was fixed. Definitely a game I enjoy.

This will be a great game if they finish it, but it is not ready for early access and it is too much for what you currently get. I hope to be able to reccomend this in the future as I do see potential.

Needs a lot of work. I bought it, refunded it. I will rebuy it if it improves significantly when its out of early access. I love the premise but its not remotely close to being finished and shouldn't even be for sale as of now (1/1/18)

Not bad... but not very good either. It is essentially FTL with a different set of ideas. You control a single ship with a small crew and travel around a galactic map doing a rather small amount of things: fight ships, do missions (which are fight ships, go to a specific location, or attack a pirate base, at least those are the only ones I encountered in my first run) and trade. These are all very unremarkable. There's no real endgame from what I experienced so far, outside of a threat system that will eventually send extremely powerful ships at you. I died to the first nemesis ship, as it had four weapons and I had one. The ship combat is slow, VERY slow, and has minimal input from the player. You simply click on one of the enemy ship systems and shoot at it until it is destroyed, then repeat. The starting ship only has a single weapon slot, I would imagine ships you can unlock later down the line have more, but with only a single weapon the combat takes forever, and you will die to the first ship you encounter that has more weapons than you (i.e. two weapons). Also, if your single weapon can't penetrate ship shields, you'll never beat a shielded ship before it can jump to hyperspace. The main suggestion I can make is to just increase damage values or decrease health, or both, as it really shouldn't take so long to destroy a simple merchant vessel. Boarding is possible, but not really an option for the starting ship due to room constraints, as you need a room for a teleporter. One different idea that FTL doesn't share is ground combat. Every now and then you come across a pirate base and will teleport your crew inside to fight, there are a few enemies inside that your crew will fight along with loot to pick up that you can sell later. This is even slower than the ship combat, it just takes forever for a crew of three to kill a single enemy. Again, increase damage or decrease health, it's just boring to sit and watch three people shoot at one person for an extended period of time. The trading... exists? There's really not much to it, simply buy low and sell high. Not very innovative but not bad either. It ultimately just leads to you running back and forth between systems with little else to do. More trading options would be welcome, maybe some kind of contraband system, inflation, anything that could spice it up, as it's really just bare-bones in its current state. I'm not impressed, though I'm not really disappointed either. I think this game has a lot of potential to succeed where it is currently failing. The game is early access, so I can only hope this is one of the developers that actually change their game during this phase. For the time being, I can't recommend, it's simply boring in its current state.

As of current state of the game (Still in early access), I will give a thumb down. (June 2018) It is a fun game. You manage a spaceship, being a pirate, a merchant, or a traveler. You can attack civilian ships and other pirates, being the guy who does not miss the chance to rob someone; or trade, being the richest ship in the universe; or travel, being a pacifist who spends time traveling before the end of time; or combine the roles as you see fit. You have to manage the fuel and food early game, saving credits to retrofit or upgrade the ship as soon as possible. You might ask why the thumb down then? Here is the reason: Game bugs and crashes. I cannot play more than 10 mins for the first 2 hours. It mostly crashes when you start a spaceship fight. It can also crash when you start or during a dungeon mission. You can be stuck on certain part of a map, the enemy can be stuck on certain part of the map, and the gun firing sound changes when you move the character or when the enemy moves… Another minor reason is combat. I mainly play pirate to experience combat. Ship combat is fine and sometimes fun. What I really do not like is crews to NPC gun fight. The animation is dull. At certain point, you just wish there is a fast-forward button to finish each fight. Judging by the updates section, the dev constantly updates the game. I will happily give a thumb up once the crashing problem is fixed.

The game showed potential, but the keyword here is potential, and it is unrealized. As the cliche saying goes: this game attempts to have the breadth of an ocean but it has the depth of a pond. Galactic Crew attempts to combine multiple genre into one game: Space Ship Management, but there are no distinct pros and cons for each types of ship. It's always the bigger the better. Space Exploration, but the graphics aren't there, and there are no in-depth mechanic for crew management other than fuel and food cost per jump. No drama or relations in between the crew, or tension in between different species. Things that would have made for an interesting game. Epic space battle, but the gameplay mechanics fall flat. I try really hard not to compare this with FTL, but FTL has set the bar for any real-time ship-to-ship combat with how things are micro'd. RNG Encounters, but since the maps are all custom made, there is a certain level of repetition. It also feels weird to see modern era buildings and even Victorian era stone roads for the places your crew landed on when it is supposed to be this galaxy (or star system?) faring crew. Real-Time Combat, but all you do is press on one crew member (can't drag your mouse and select multiple crew btw) and target one enemy, repeat for the rest of your member, and maybe have your medic start healing the first guy who's taking the hits once his/her health is low. There is no XCOM or in-depth combat mechanics here. RPG Character Customization, but there is hardly anything to customize, what could have been an innovative way to customize your crew just became these ugly 3D heads for all races and they all somewhat speak English. Last but not least, the GUI and User control. This is often the very first thing I care about for any game I play, it's the ease of use for any UI. The character selection for the real-time combat is awkward, the commands are awkward, the scrolling is awkward, and I have posted this on the discussion a long while ago. I will say, though, Benjamin has been responsive on the discussion, but for something as critical as UI and control to be so inconvenient for the players, I do wonder if those replies were simply empty promises to keep players from realizing that the game has now been released and this is the "game" they're getting. Overall, I regret paying twenty dollars for it. I would not even recommend the game for 10, maybe 5, given its current state on April 7th, 2019. Perhaps in a few years once Ben deliver all of his proposed changes, and hopefully this game doesn't turn into one of those abandonwares, I will then bother to come back and change this review to a positive one.

This could have been very good game, but followed all too common pattern of abruptly releasing promising game out of early access and abanoning it. Game is playable, but feel unfinished; it is unstable and buggy. While the concept is good and for a while the game is enjoyable, it is not finished game, bugs really ruin the immersion and I cannot recoomend it in current shape.