Maybe she gets sick and slacks off for a bit. Realism! Why not throw your space commute a little Kerbal?Ĭrew management is pretty much non-existent after the act of hiring someone. Today’s two day trip is tomorrow’s five day trip. I guess I can appreciate a game that tries to simulate the shifting layout of a solar system. The orbiting planets intersecting with the long curving trajectories of your spaceship on its intercept course is another nice touch that really doesn’t add much. Like the flight to whatever space station you’re going to next, it’s just a matter of me zoning out until it happens. To unlock a particular room or weapon, research all its components, which gets you a good bit of the way to other rooms and components. But instead of researching specific ship components, you’re researching technologies common to several of them. You have to learn new ships components before you buy them and new places to fly before you fly there. If you keep promoting them, which increases their salaries, you might find that you’ve outstripped the income you’re making doing inconsequential missions or buying and selling goods, which is simultaneously easy and a pain in the ass. The only way to screw up is to pay your crew more than you’re making. You’re just flying back and forth making money. There’s really no meaningful challenge here and even less meaningful interaction among the systems. Perhaps the most damning thing about Cosmonautica is that the bugs don’t make much difference. I guess there are decisions to make in deep space. Why is my captain still “taking a dump” in her bunkbed? Which isn’t just her bunkbed. Long stretches of boredom interspersed by brief intense periods of confusion. That’s the thing with space, with the divide between travel and combat. Have fun figuring out the combat, in which you suddenly have a lot of finicky stuff to do. You have to figure out that any efficient spaceship has two (2!) pilots in order to get where it’s going faster. You have to figure out that hot bunking is the norm in space. Like many indie games with long early access periods, Cosmonautica can’t be bothered to teach you how to play. I can only imagine the ongoing wars in the Cosmonautica universe. The chief source of onboard tension during space travel is the eternal divide between people who like meat, people who like vegetables, and people who like bread. The underlying political message in Cosmonautica is that people who don’t like the same foods can’t get along with each other. ![]() I can see why someone is unhappy or how desperately they need a shower or that they don’t like another crew member who’s a vegetarian. Besides, the numbers are visible elsewhere. I get the feeling I’m not supposed to be paying this close attention to the underlying simulation, that I should just go with it. Sometimes my crew does when it looks to me like they’re sleeping. Wait, why is my captain “taking a dump” in her bunkbed? The Thunamon? Where do I rename my ship? Okay, let’s go live the life cosmonautica with this adorable cutaway view, where I can see my crew do stuff like piloting, science, eating, sleeping, and, uh, “taking a dump”? Really? This is going to be that kind of game? ![]() These are the voyages of the starship whatever this thing is called. Here you are with your brand new ship and your brand new crew and a brand new galaxy, ready for your very own personal star trek. To its credit, Cosmonautica makes a great first impression. Just zone out until you get to the next space station.Īfter the jump, we’re still not there yet. You’re just a spectator in a game where there’s nothing interesting to see. Maybe you’d have to coordinate your crew the way you coordinate sims. ![]() You thought you would have a role to play when you first watched your crew scurry about in that precious cutaway view of your ship. It didn’t seem like it was going to be that way when you first started Cosmonautica. Unfortunately, Cosmonautica doesn’t have a good answer, so zone out it is. Because what are you going to do when you’re not having a space battle? The same thing you do on a car trip? Listen to podcasts or books on tape? Chat with your buddy? Play “I Spy” with your kids? Zone out? Zone out is the answer provided by most games about flying through space. Flying across the reaches of empty space, which is pretty much what spaceships do, isn’t really a good thing to make a game about. Better games than Cosmonautica have struggled with how to make commutes interesting.
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