The Spatials
Thanks mainly to the Internet it is very rare these days that I’ll buy a game with absolutely no knowledge of what it will be like or info on the company who made it, however there was just something about The Spatials that seemed to push the right buttons and made it an instant gut shot purchase..
Admittedly I’m a massive Star Trek fan so the initial vibe of it kind of caught my eye, and I was fairly aware of a rival game in the criminally under developed sci-fi space station management sim genre by Double Fine which spectacularly imploded a few days prior to this games release in March (2015) which may have had an impact on me. Had DF9, I think they’d punningly titled it, come off properly I’d probably have snapped that up too, but as it stood there was no game out there that scratched that particular itch until The Spatials popped up on my Steam queue.
Again I didn’t really know what to expect, but at a penny shy of ten whole english pounds it seemed worth a gamble and in a way reminded me of the similar gut purchases when I was young where Id buy a £1.99 game from my local newsagent for the ZX Spectrum with only a random piece of artwork on the front to give you an idea and a small square of game footage to go on (sometimes sneakily from a different system, though I could always tell) well also a little bit of blurb. Sometimes I’d strike gold, other times Id be humbly perplexed at the folly.
Thankfully I can say on The Spatials the gamble paid off.
So to boil it down to its essence The Spatials is basically theme park in space with light rpg elements, resource management and an additional isometric “Away Team” game to help collect resources and credits needed to upgrade your station and keep your visitors happy.
At the beginning you’re given an air lock on an asteroid and five crewmen and it’s up to you to decide how best to build your station, hire new officers, send your team on missions (which you control), send your crew on random missions with a percentage chance of success based on their level (which you don’t control), or simply have your crew building up the station or working the various food manufacturing and goods manufacturing factories to keep your station supplied. The more you level up your crew the better they get (working quicker, or building faster), but on the downside they also get more needy, beginning with just wanting a place to sleep but leading on to hunger, thirst, hygiene, entertainment etc and craving specific things along the way.
The isometric viewpoint and wonderfully cute characters lend it a particular charm, though some of the gameplay mechanic choices and hint of simplicity lead me to believe they may be looking at an iOS release at one point, or possibly it started out as one and then evolved onto the PC/Mac platform instead. Ive got to say it doesn’t hurt the game though as they seem to have struck a decent balance between a casual timewaste and a more in depth experience, and the latest patch (version 2.8 may 2015) adds additional levels of difficulty such as permadeath, salaries for your minions and decreased production for those who may find the main game a mite easy.
As it stood just prior to this patch Id done two run throughs and had hit a wall in that I was struggling to make my station sustainable. In the end I had to opt for a rather callous real world approach of firing all middle management (who were draining my resources, notably soap) replacing with cheap level 1 labour who didn’t need soap (smelly, low skilled workforce) as well as plonking many arcade entertainment machines and drugs dispensers to bring in the lucre from the masses.
My current play-through on permadeath for the away team has meant a change of tactics though. Whereas before I had an almost Kirk-like gung-ho attitude to away team boss fights, missiles and phasers blazing, I have now found myself opting for a more measured approach and using different skills for my officers with more tactical timing. Each officer class has a special skill that can be replaced for different effects. For the most part your scientist and doctor officers are relatively straight forward, offering you massive heals to one officer, or distributed heals, and the same with power regeneration. The other three officers though have a variety of skills. Your diplomat can placate your enemies for a few seconds, or make them fight each other. The engineer can bring missiles, grenades or even a robot to the fight, and the Strategist can bring a whole host of weapons to bare from shotguns to sniper rifles. These three officers skills in particular can help you take down tough higher level bosses and when combo’d correctly can at least mitigate the worst of the damage.
Beating higher level opponents can gain you new skills and stat upgrades for your officers, or these can be recycled into other items as well. It makes for a nice upgrade path for your officers and keeps you thinking of where the shortfall on your team currently is. Unlocking the next star system is the way the game progresses the level, adding additional resources you need to build more advanced goods, though you can also replay older missions on any planet at a higher difficulty for bonuses in planetary resource collection and loot.
Played in real time with your station means you can switch back and forth between the two parts of the game, checking on a buildings progress, or tweaking the station a bit before jumping back into the mission at hand. Again the controls on the away team are a little basic, you essentially click where you want to move your squad and click on enemies to attack them, with 1-5 used for the special skills. It has a faint cannon fodder feel to it albeit in an isometric perspective.
Under ongoing development by Weird and Wry, the game seems to get better with each iteration (though make no mistake it’s definitely a finished product, but as a sandbox game it lends itself to improvements and tweaks. This is more akin to development on Terraria for example which has changed massively over the years from the game I initially purchased than say an early access style release) and for an indie title is definitely worth a look if you’re looking for a theme park style game, or are a bit of a trekkie, or just a nice time waste. You can’t really go far wrong.
