Space Pirates and Zombies

Next best thing until starsector releases on steam

A true thing of beauty... simple, complex, and completely elegant in its design. remoinds me of the game flow from playstation and the first level of spore... this is what true gaming was back then, a thing of true love. sad to see the second game drifted so far away from this.

SPAZ 1 is an above-average game that turns into a genuinely good one with a single, well-chosen mod. At a certain point, I hit a difficulty wall, and the grind stopped being fun. That’s where the “Less Grind / More Hangars Mod + Vanilla Scripts (2023)” came to the rescue: https://steamcommunity.com/app/107200/discussions/1/3952532399701094826/ With this mod, the game shifts focus to what it does best—controlling and developing an ever-growing fleet of starships—which is where the real fun lies. In other areas, it very much feels like an indie title: sound design, effects, and UI are all a bit rough around the edges. That said, I genuinely loved the art style—it’s distinctive and memorable. All in all, this is a game best picked up at a discount, especially if you’re willing to enhance it with mods.

INTRODUCTION i wish there was a "meh" option and i should give this game a negative review but because the game is so old and was created by two people and is still a better option then a lot of new games made by bigger studios I'll give this a thumbs up. i started playing this back in high school and beat most of the game and then left it alone until recently where I beat this in the last couple of days. What I realized is that this is basically a Ubisoft-style game. This is because it basically takes some really cool ideas you won't find anywhere else and then throws them into a grind-fest where if someone was fun once you have to do it 100 times to the point where it is no longer fun. That's probably my biggest issue with this game: it is so unreasonably grindy. You need to keep your resources topped up to keep making progress in the campaign and it takes so long to collect resources that it just gets annoying. And then on top of that you'll keep getting events where your mothership will get attacked and you just have to sit through that and it takes a while. On the one hand I like the challenge of your main base being attacked but on the other hand there's a point in the game where it will be attacked every three system jumps and it starts to get annoying. Nothing is really difficult per se just more time consuming then it should be. Eventually while finishing this off i did get smart and mod the game so i could reduce the grind a bit so it wasn't as ridiculous. GENERAL COMPLAINTS --select enemy units is garbage - half the time the game won't let you select the enemy ship you want, if you change which of your ships you are controlling the game will override your selection so you have to reselect the ship you want, and if you have a ship selected and the ship cloaks instead of being able to tell your ships to try to reacquire it you are forced to select a different ship even if that is to your disadvantage. --mass retreat doesn't always work --There really are not enough options for directing your ships that are currently on autopilot. For example you should be able to: ----Tell an autopilot to remain at the mothership or in a particular area ----Return to the beacon and drop off extra crew or whatever ----Have one ship attack one target and a different ship attack another --In general the autopilot ship AI is just really bad and they will get themselves killed as much as they can --Cloaking is mega-dumb and doesn't working in a way you'd expect --A lot of the issues with controlling your AI ships and the cloaking mechanics are very evident in the mandatory sneak mission. You literally have to sell off your ships except one and rebuy them after the mission. The one you keep you have to refit into a small cloaking ship. This all causes an unnecessary hit to your resources. Instead you should be able to tell your excess ships to remain at the mothership or at least out of sight. And in all honesty, why can't you just make a temporary small cloaking ship for the mission instead of having to refit whichever ship you are bringing? The whole setup is such a waste of time and resources. Also, I found that without investing into the cloaking tech tree the mission is basically impossible which is annoying since I don't use cloaking otherwise. When I did the mission with a fully maxed cloaking tree (and a maxed out subsystems tree), top of the lines cloaking and boosters the mission was still tedious. Also the sneak meter refills way too slowly when you're out of the enemy's sight and if something bad happens and you have to let it refill it is so boring. And why would that have a sneak mission anyway? Stealth is so terrible in this game it makes no sense. --The arena was designed by some with severe brain trauma --For some reasons you can only use resources from your mothership to buy things at stations instead of resources from your mothership + your fleet. This is really stupid when the cost of something is greater then what your mothership can hold --The movement controls are stupid with a capital R GENERAL COMPLIMENTS --There is a really fun tactical element to the game that I don't think I've seen elsewhere. This is in terms of the armor you can put on your ships and how it weights your ships down so sometimes it is better to dump armor for more speed. Especially since the more dmg the armor takes the less effective it is --The part where you're trying to secure the galaxy from zombies is really fun even if the missions to clear each system and the constant attacks on your mothership are a ridiculous time waste --The game is satisfying to play even though the grind is super frustrating CONCLUSION Basically a fun game that doesn't respect your time at all. If you like AC games you'll *love* this one. A lot better if you mod it to take the need to spend hours building resources up which is honestly the worst part of the game. i haven't seen it personally but apparently people got on the dev's cases for SPAZ2 a lot when that game came out. Some people said it was unfair but i think I'd agree with it. From what i understand the criticism was why make a completely different and experimental game instead of making a better version of SPAZ1 which would have been the superior product. That's basically how I feel. Having played SPAZ one I can say I like a lot of what the game does but it's held back by issues and bad design choices. There's also limitations of the game's systems that I did not and am not going to get into. I don't regret buying the game but I have no desire to play SPAZ2 doesn't seem to have been made to address any of these issues. I'd rather see them take the lessons learned from SPAZ1 and make something that builds upon this game as opposed to throw those lessons away to just start over again.

THE HULL HAS BEEN BREACHED AND THE SCIENCE IS LEAKING OUT

Pretty fun, very grindy game. Once you get the swing of it you will be doing the same thing over and over, but if you enjoy what you're doing, it hardly feels like work.

Pretty fun game with constant progression, very appeasing even in 2026

This game gets a little tiresome and I eventually wandered away from it, but the gameplay is solid and the missions are fun. Best of all it's funny, and not in a jokey parody way but in well thought out little moments. It's been a long time since I played it so I won't go into detail, but I just realized I never did a recommendation and it absolutely deserves one.

Timeless classic.

What's not to like, I did all of the achievements even. TotalBiscuit gave his voice to one of the best space top down shooters ever made. Only eclipsed by the one and only starfarer, or starsector as it is named these days. Visuals that still hold up nicely, I guess because they are sprites made with love and not 3d crap that gets outdated fast. I mean sure, there are some parts that look a bit off, but it's overall still very nice. Well, I guess you can see that on the screencaps on the page. Lots of color, nice unique ship designs, decent effects. Audio, THE HULL HAS BEEN BREACHED AND THE SCIENCE IS LEAKING OUT! Well apart from that line that has permanently sunk into my neurons I can't remember much. I think it was nice overall, I kinda remember the ion beams and missiles having decent audio. On top of that the gameplay offers quite a few builds, some more valid than others. At least on the harder difficulties some are quite hard to make work, like it's a lot of work to even punch through shields if you focus on weapons that are ♥♥♥♥ against shields. It offers fun progression. Also there are "officers" that give rather insane bonuses at later stages, although you really do need all of that if you are going to beat the game at harder difficulties. Each ship has different stats and slots for weapons/utilities. Each sector you go into has sort of a puzzle to solve before you get to the next one, nothing too big, but you almost need to analyze which side to pick. Compared to starsector, this one is a bit more quirky, easy, and faster paced. I'd say this one is better than the second one, easily. At 9,99€ this game offers insane value if you are at all into games like this. A game made with love and vision, get it!