SpaceShips is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of StarSector (Copyright Fractal Softworks, 2013). Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to their obligations under copyright law, and often steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done. At this stage no legal action has been taken by Fractal Softworks against the "developer" here, but it's never off the table, as previous copyright law cases have shown.
Putting aside the unethical intellectual bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept for profit, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off. SpaceShips is considerably worse than StarSector.
It's an incomplete, buggy mess, and the developer abandoned this 6 months ago. They made a commitment to finish and publish the game in 2021, but failed... instead choosing to take gamers money and not deliver the product. Unethical abuse of Early Access. Really not okay.
This is somewhat of a joke game, while the base, unfinished mechanics resemble the spaceship building and management and "SpaceWar/Asteroids" like gameplay, the developer made his own rather cringe sound effects and voice over, trying to go viral for being "so bad it's good", I guess. But this isn't good at all.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The game features somewhat lazy, simplistic "retro" looking 2D graphics, and it's hard to say if this is due to the age of the assets used, if it's a deliberate attempt for the game to look bad/retro on purpose, or if the assets are just, well, terrible looking. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game in 2026, such poor quality 2D graphics in the 3D era just aren't good enough, whether it's a deliberate design fault on behalf of the developer or they just couldn't manage to do any better, this is a compromise gamers shouldn't have to put up with.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
These technical shortcomings push this game below minimum standards for any competently developed modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was [b]only 3 players[/b]. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 140,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Let's talk about pricing and the actual value this has for gamers. Is this game one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam?
SpaceShips is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it.
The quality problems and defects with this game makes the asking price totally unrealistic. It's impossible to recommend this to gamers here on Steam.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
