Space Pirates and Zombies 2, now with more neon!

Place a bounty on enemy station. Wait for the mayhem to settle. And then go in and build your base.

Leaving a faction for my own.

My very own Faction.

I invited. And they turned up!

My second base.

I’m currently sitting at threat level 142 with this carrier design.

That’s seven hangars right there, with potential room for an eight on forward port. I fitted a sniper cannon with a minigun, but I’m probably going to replace that with another hangar.

Killing things is slow, especially starbases, but it’s completely risk free. Even on the off chance something comes after you, you can outrun them easily with so many engines.

I’m going to look for more nose and engine hangars and make a single line wide carrier that should fit ten hangars total. 15 cores is the maximum you can get.

That looks mean. If somewhat messy. =)

Mission accomplished.

It’s fast, but without wings it turns like the brick it is.

Do i need to do something to get a second starbase in story mode?

I conquered by neighbor finally, saved the money for another base and was HUGELY disappointed that contrary to basically all of the tooltips, i did not get command of the starbase, even when it was may own faction’s type.

Also, why can i upgrade starbases i don’t own but not my own? is this a bug or am i missing something? I have a ton of money but my starbase is stuck at level 9.

Making some progress expanding the bases slowly.

Current design right now. Still using the L shape.

The Chainsaw Beam looks scary. Have not figured how best to use it.

Right now, my battles involve me boosting and ramming into the engines of the enemies. I found that with the engine boost, I can push them away from even the escape gates. That prevents enemy from escaping!

The ramming is also powerful. It seems that if the enemy is unshielded, a ram and a full broadside can sometimes destroy a whole row of weaponry. The health on the enemy drops like a brick.

Play some more, the story mode will unlock the capability to form your own faction. You can only own multiple bases when it’s your own faction. When you join another faction, you are limited to only 1 base.

I must have missed that memo =/

Also, the ability to upgrade your own base is also locked behind the story progression.

Two 3 slot chain saw beams and 2 2 slot pulsars. Miniguns on the sides. A mix of missiles, miniguns and a fighter bay on the back.

The chain saws seem to do pretty good damage even against armor.

An inverted L shape design.

Allows me to speed up very quickly with boost and ram as well execute a turn very quickly.

I don’t like how ships looks like a ugly combination of colours and shapes. ugly colours and ugly shapes.

I don’t look like a game I would want to play.

Aesthetics are hard to get right. Not sure how they are going to “improve” the looks of the game.

A bit more play time and my faction grows.

Expanded into the green faction and the zombie infection starts. (Purple one in the middle.)

Cleared the infection with the inverted L shaped design.
Greeted with a winning screen.

Here is what the map looks like.

The end was quite quick. Basically used the ramming followed by a full broadside on any ship I saw. Even very powerful ones, die in about 10-20 seconds.

The end “boss” Zombie infestation was handled with the same tactic. Took about 8 minutes I think because of the many enemies present.

I clocked in 20 hours. Had some fun.

I think it still needs some work before it can be a great title.

My opinions:

Major issues:

  1. Once you reach a certain level, (not even close to highest level), nothing can threaten you anymore.
  2. The gameplay feels repetitive once you are past the beginning learning/exploratory stage.
    – The strategic screen is still very boring, taking over stations and regions basically just involves the exact same thing happening over and over again.
  3. The 4 ship limitation on tactical battles take away the potential for great battles.
  4. It lacks the “something” that Drox Operative had.
    – Probably despite the independent captains doing their own stuff, the things they do is very limited. All they can do is either attack another ship or another station.
    – The stations does not offer missions like Drox does so maybe that illusion of objectives is lacking here. Since everything is self directed. I think story mode will be better in this aspect.

Good stuff:

  1. The core game play involves blowing other to bits in the tactical battles. It’s fun figuring what works and what don’t.
  2. There is a good spread of weapons configuration possible. Check out the arena for different styles of weapons at work.
  3. The configuration of your ship is fun, allowing you to experiment.

Quibbles:

  1. They are still balancing the resources to avoid grinding. Feels about right at the moment. But some people complain on the forums.
  2. The ship customizations screen takes a lot getting used to. It’s very sensitive (demanding accuracy) and yet is not precise enough on the controls.

Once you are past the exploratory and level up to mid-ish level, the game does not offer any more challenge and feels “grindy”, despite having no grindy elements. You can tweak with the starting conditions in sandbox mode and make the zombies more of a challenge if you want, but doing wack a mole with zombie captains is no joke… (Captains can become infected once they die to a zombie, and it seems that they can never be cured…)

Overall, I had my fun, it’s very polished for a Early Access release, never had any crash bug. Enjoyed the 20 hours I spent. But I dont see myself going back soon since the strategic gameplay mechanics is very basic.

Funny. I played about 5 hours of this before realizing it’s not finished enough for me to want to play it so I booted up Drox, which I only played for an hour in the earliest beta phase. Wow, that came a long way, very much sucked into it right now.

I’m probably done with it for now mostly just because i have other games i want to play more right now (Final Fantasy 10).

I enjoyed it for the most part, although i still wish they had make a true sequel to the first game which i feel is a lot better. It is a bit rough around the edges but it is pretty good for early access i guess.

I had thought i will hate the 3D on 2D plane game play. But the implementation is quite good. Weapons modules blocking LOS makes designing weapons placement matter instead of just being something you slap on and working magically in most games…

SPAZ 1 was even more simplistic when it came to combat and strategic screen. I restarted SPAZ just before SPAZ2 came out and could not play past the first 10 minutes when I realised I did not look forward to doing the same things over and over again.

The problem is that there are ways to exploit LOS on weapons and you can’t use height to place turrets on the middle (read: sub cores with guns). The weapons also need work in making them feel more distinct and interesting.

That said both games are pretty grind heavy.