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| The Long Journey Home by Mischief Maker 05/27/2019, 8:17pm PDT | ||||
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| Seriously eyeing but not pulling the trigger on Surviving Mars and Planet Alpha reminded me of this little unknown gem. I'm not sure why I set it aside in the first place, must've been a rage quit.
The Long Journey Home is a roguelite take on the old Starflight games with more of a NASA/2001 aesthetic than Star Trek. The premise is in the near future the human race has developed its first FTL jump drive and you control a skeleton crew of astronauts taking the jump-capable ship for its maiden voyage to alpha centauri, only things go a tiny bit awry and you find yourself flung thousands of parsecs away from Earth. You quickly discover that this area of space is inhabited by a variety of spacefaring alien races and if you want to survive the trip home, you're gonna have to make friends. Do you like "Thrust?" Then this game might be for you. Your ship flies into a star system with various planets in orbit and maneuvers around the star system's gravity wells with newtonian physics to get into stable orbits around planets to scan them. If there's something worth getting and it's not too hostile, you can send your lander onto the surface to mine resources or explore ruins or other stuff, controlling exactly like thrust, except meant for mouse controls (protip: start thrusting upward the instant you enter the atmosphere on any normal gravity or higher world or you'll smack against the surface, hard!) Strangely, asteroid mining and broadside-firing ship-to-ship combat (same engine) do not have newtonian physics and your ship will slowly come to a stop in the absence of thrusting. In any case, sooner or later aliens are going to introduce themselves to you and more importantly give you missions. Your ship is capable of jumping between stars in a cluster, but to travel between star clusters you need to use ancient star gates that are owned and operated by the alien factions and charge a toll in alien currency (adjusted based on your relations with the faction) so you'll need to do some weird work to earn those space bucks. The weird and occasionally silly personalities of the alien races really strongly remind of Starflight/Star Control. The game does a great job of making planets look believably huge and epic in scale, but the real highlight in this game is the music, making your journey sound like some of the most epic triumph-of-human-discovery ever, even when your ship is completely falling apart from stresses it was never built to take. As for negatives, well as I mentioned your ship was not designed to take the stresses you'll be putting it through and things are constantly falling apart from wear and tear. Nothing that will make victory impossible, but definitely a growing hindrance. Fortunately alien starbases can repair the damage for a price. Another problem is the star system navigation is fairly slow if you want to be frugal and conserve fuel, and the conversation snippets between crewmembers can get repetative. To sum it up, it's like an old Microprose game in the "Pirates!" mold in a Starflight-esque setting with lots of physics-based minigames. I'd say this can wait for a sale, but it's pretty fun and very unique in its presentation. |
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The Long Journey Home by 05/27/2019, 8:17pm PDT  |
