This game's title screen kinda lies, you know. It looks like there's going to be rigorously most shooty space battles, and on the most part ... Well we'll get into it.
Weird worlds: Return to Infinite Space is essentially a 4X game through the filter of having 1.5X instead of the full four. Unlike the other four in this so-called Dork Quadrant, it doesn't really involve being a topdown or side-scrolling shooter, and is instead a pointy clicky space map game. It reminds me a lot of playing Master of Orion Two, looking both visually similar and borrowing a couple elements, though this is not to say that the game is that deep or that uncreative.
Merely that if you're familiar with taking a space ship and exploring the stars on a 2d map with little distances between them, you'll probably find this game almost eeriely familiar.
Weird worlds is based around going through space, with an expiration date, and doing "things" for score. The initial concept is a promising one - a vast universe to unravel and hunt through, with a tight time table and an unforgiving menace lurking among the stars. As I said, it conveys the impression of being a 4X game - You fly your ship planet to planet, and you mostly explore (1x) and very rarely exterminate (0.5x) - but between the two points on the spectrum, you're sort of left holding the bag.
Once you get the basic system down, Weird worlds has a couple great hours of gaming as you explore the first couple universes. It is "roguelike" with all those trappings, which to me have mostly ended up feeling more like excuses in this day and age. In this case the roguelike elements are pretty gentle, and the game doesn't go out of its way to murder you.Basically, you go from world to world looking for loot, upgrades, aliens to contact or fight and events. You have a relative time frame to do this in, depending on the map size, and various upgrades can dramatically change how you move around the sector. Generally speaking, you fight only if you want to engage and most engagements can be quickly retreated from.
The world to world part stuff is mostly described in text - the star map is pretty, with little animated star systems, nebula and black hole (including a black hole slowly drinking away at a nebula it is in, which looks neat) but it doesn't really waste too much effort on this. Star systems can have different kinds of stars, including binary, but they seem to make little difference as to what can be on the star. I say "star" because in spite of the fact it references planets, no system has more than one planet, which seems rather silly given our solar system has eight and I don't believe is described by astronomers as much of an anomaly in that.
The game is very charming in this, and very relaxing. Sometimes you run into neat little events that harken back to older gaming - no spoilers here - but also little things like stars going nova is pretty cool. It looks cool, and it's pretty neat watching the novas since they move against your ship speed. So if you're folding space, the nova barely moves, whereas if you're in some slow as a space bus bucket of bolts you struggle to outrun it and watch it plow into nearby systems. I don't know that novas actually do that, but it's neat looking anyway.Charming is a good word for the game in general, especially when it comes to the visuals. The designs of the ship are generally good, and the various little alien quips or events are sharply written. There's a couple cute twists in events, stuff that made me smirk or laugh outloud in surprise, which is good.
The combat is sort of where the game falls apart a little, and like I said, the title screen lies. Generally speaking you do not want to engage in combat and there is little reward for doing so; it is difficult to determine enemy strength beyond looking at the size of their ships and numbers, and it is hard to really get upgraded much at all. The combat is really simple to look at, and mostly runs itself, but that's where the simplicity of it ends.The game on the other hand has the general rogue fatigue that I associate with roguelikes in general and in this case I have no idea why it bothers with this sort of nonsense. The game tells you what engines do and that's it. Do thrusters make me go faster, is this weapon better than other weapons, does this shield work better? You just need to keep slamming your face into the game over and over, trying to figure out what is or isn't. The problem here is the game gives so little feedback I honestly don't know how I'm supposed to deduce any useful information from encounters. Everything is just so vague.
Beyond that the game just suffers from neither doing enough in general and doing enough with its core premise. You spend most of each game just going from star to star, picking up loot. That's fine, but the amount of loot and events in the game is rather thin. Two or three games and you'll have seen most of the content, and I don't really get why. It can't take that much development time to add a couple more events, and just having the same loot over and over gets boring. You very rarely hit on more interesting events like arriving just in time to fight in a three way battle, but much of the game is just floating from star to star.
Lastly, the game's attitude toward combat is dogged by its attitude toward stats - ie, you have no idea which enemies are hard and which aren't since you don't know how good your weapons or allies even are - and just generally unforgiving. The diplomacy angle tends to be centred on drops or events as well, which tends to make the game feel a little less like a video game and a lot more like a board game.While I like Weird worlds, and think it does successfully capture that great part of an 4X where you're searching the galaxy, it could use ... More. If you're looking for a nice little coffee game to get a couple hours out of, I think Weird worlds fits the bill just fine, but it is much more shallow and obnoxious than it needs to be for deeper long term playing. I really wish the combat felt less "brick wall" and more like something more naturally in the game.
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