Witch cards will drop: Space Run

Tower defense games are, on the most part, one of the few genres I feel is always reliable. TD games are almost always "good" if they look good but inversely almost never "great" no matter how great they look on the surface. A handful I've played have really impressed me, but usually by stepping a measure outside the genre, though that often enough doesn't work so well either. The best example of a completely in genre TD is probably Defense Grid, while the best one working outside the genre is probably Orcs Must Die 2. Both of those have sequels I'm not all that eager to play, which shows just how tenuous the process can be.

Space Run is, without a doubt, completely in the genre of being a TD game. Oh, it tries to step out a little. The game is about running cargo along a straight 'space lane' or whatever you want to call it, which is a very linear track. As you go, various obstacles and enemies arrive, hover around your ship for a little and then sometimes wander off, fight you, or whatever else. If they're asteroids, sometimes they run into you, which is hurtful.

Your main character is the handsome and handsomely named Buck Mann, an everyman space jockey who owes money to the space mafia (which unfortunately does not include references to Black Shadow or Blue Bacchus)  and works as a space runner. Your partner is the android Addam12, who has 12 written on his forehead and is drawn in a manner that reminds me a little of Kryten of Red Dwarf but isn't voiced in quite a charming way. He's a beep boop robot, etc.

Buck Mann accepts jobs from various wacky characters; well, the first company you work with isn't all that wacky, but everyone afterward is increasingly strange. Then you're off to drive a spaceship in a straight line through space and tower defense your way through what may come.



The first and most basic thing to mention about Space Run is it gives the appearance of floating through space, but this was done in such a lazy manner that you really are floating through space in spite of the fact the game makes a big deal about thrust and visually demonstrating you're "going faster". Your speed, relative to the speed of everything around you, doesn't do anything or have any impact on the game besides determining part of your level score and I suppose very rarely allowing you to slip away from a wave of enemies. Slowly tumbling asteroids still hit you, pirates still catch up from behind, etc etc. It's grating. Enemies can and do arrive from basically every vector, including nonsense like asteroids running into the back of your ship, which makes even less sense. While it's true spaceborn objects flopping between planets are going very fast indeed, you're supposed to be a FTL freighter. How are rocks in space slowly tumbling into you?

The game's other core gimmick can be described in two parts. Unlike most tower defense games where towers are pretty functional without much input from you, and the strategy is how to overlap them to maximize outgoing dps, Space Run is a much more active game. Your ship is built of hexagons and as enemies pass by, they attack the nearest hexagon. Hexagons link together, and positioning is extremely important just to get basic functionality from your weapons. Much of your play is dominated by re-aligning existing turrets to fire on incoming enemies, even mid-wave, which would feel pretty great if the game's visuals weren't so cluttered.

On top of managing your hexes and your turrets, you also have activated abilities that consume building currency to use. Almost all of the activated abilities I got through were extremely useful, even ones you'd think wouldn't be. In terms of keeping you on your toes and reacting to changes circumstances, Space Run is very good.

And also very bad.

Visually Space Run is too cluttered for its own good. As I said, you need to use activated abilities, but the color palette is muted and sorting out what is connected to what takes a couple seconds too long if you're in the middle of a firefight. It feels like towers should be very sharp colored coded, but instead everything just looks industrial. The game in general is too cluttered for its own good, with turrets requiring clear lines of sight to work and many towers being oppressively difficult to slot together. As I said, instead of overlapping to maximize, the game is about overlapping to function at all, and it starts to get really annoying.

In terms of audio the music is fine, nothing special, but the voice acting is very good. It's sort of weird, actually, the game's voice acted dialogue is pretty well written for what the game is and works cleanly. Buck Mann is a dork, his android is kind of android-y, the various contracts you work for have reasonable spokespersons and the like. The menues and UI, in general, are quite good and it's really only the three dimensional objects that let the game down.

The game actually has you getting paid for your runs, and the better you do, the more you get paid and the more things you can buy. You're incentivized to complete runs repeatedly to get a better score, and you're paid each time, so the game has grinding and it doesn't feel super great. There's actually a lot of variety in terms of enemy ships, though a lot of them are just opposing hexagons assembled into different classes of enemy craft.

Oh, I want to mention the game saves your loadout when you restart. This is so nice. So very nice.

Anyway, like I said, Space Run is mostly let down by design choices that cramp the game too much. Turrets and towers are, generally speaking, very powerful in this game and it doesn't feel like having two or three facing a threat is ridiculously undergunned except when facing bosses or the like. But that being said, you're given very little space and as the game progresses it becomes more and more about having the exact correct towers in the exact correct spot, while managing larger and larger cargo or just losing. There's no real wave structure, either, things just show up and need to be dealt with.

The game just gets irritating in terms of needing to account for every direction and having enough support, and keeping that support lining up, instead of that great feeling you get in TD games where your defenses just work perfectly. The moving turrets are sort of nice, but the part where you have to account for turrets getting in the way and individually moving them just gets annoying fast. If you're looking for a more active, more hectic but still true to the genre tower defense game Space Run is... Well, it's sort of frustrating in that you need to adjust things and sometimes you just have to re-do a run...  But it's definitely a far more lively tower defense game.

For me, that's a bit of a downer, and I eventually got pretty annoyed with the game's flow, but that's more a subjective thing than really disliking the game's ideas. I sort of wanted more of a tower defense "to chill" game, not one quite as frantic.