I can’t follow the usual WISP format for this game. It broke my heart a bit to play it.
Pixel Starships: Hyperspace is very nearly a real game, and more importantly a fantastic one. Brilliant design informs every interaction; clean, beautiful pixel art fills up the screen; smart mobile controls drive the experience; and there are even some genuinely new ideas (at least from my admittedly limited viewpoint). I always make a point of spending a little money in a game like this because the dev is on the right track. But.
The problem with PS:H is simple. This is a game that would be far, far, far better as a premium offering. I understand (a bit) the necessities of running a studio. You need ongoing sources of money to keep going. You need a low price point to make multiplayer functional. You need to keep people around.
I don’t actually know what the answer is to those challenges; maybe you could have a $1/month subscription to keep the multiplayer side of things going. Maybe the ship stickers/paint and high-rank crew would make for great IAPs even in a premium game. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
But.
This is the first time it has been absolutely clear to me that in tuning the core experience for the free to play investment curve, the developer has broken something essential. The most precious resource in the game isn’t gas or minerals or even Starbux, it’s time, and that’s a goddamned shame, because the game is otherwise just about perfect. Every detail has thought behind it. The people building it are obviously good at what they do.
And the progression curve unlocks genuinely interesting new gameplay! Which reminds me, I need to tell you about the automation in this game.
I remember when I first started playing Eve Online, I thought – as every new capsuleer must – that a lot of the combat in the game could be automated. In Eve, this always runs into the hard wall of Ye Olde Garde – the folks who have been playing so long they forget what fun gameplay looks like.
PS:H turns that on its head and makes automation into a metagame of its own. Early in the game, you unlock a “Command” room, which unlocks “AI”, which allows you to create pseudo-scripting rules to ensure your crew, and indeed your starship, do the right things in the heat of battle. These folks have figured it out, goddammit.
I’ve been on a run of F2P games recently. Fleet Command is Halcyon 6 without the fun parts, Space Arena is so linear that you feel like you’ve knocked teeth loose when you run into the “spend” wall, Battlelands is a smart variation on the Angry Birds motif. Hero Hunters is a great conceit wrapped in eight layers of fart-flavoured repetition. None of them hit me like Pixel Starships: Hyperspace.
This is a brilliant game almost all the way through, and it’s ruined solely and specifically by the design choices that emerge from the Free to Play model. I would pay substantial amounts of money up front for a game that showed this level of design. I would happily pay the same $15-20 I’d pay for any big-name game – Final Fantasy, Capcom’s various offerings, whatever.
But I won’t spend my own precious time as a resource in a game. That is one resource nobody gets from me.
Free to Play has been wearing on me for a while now. It’s the dominant mode of delivery on Android, and Android is where I consume a lot of my media these days. I see glimpses of brilliance everywhere; that’s why I finally broke down and started playing these games again, after all: despite their explicit encouragement of addiction and compulsive behaviours, this is where design lives now. This is how you make money and keep your game studio’s doors open.
And that’s a damned shame, because it means that a lot of the best work being done now will never reach its potential.
Play Store: Pixel Starships: Hyperspace
Dev: SavySoda
Why I Stopped Playing: You broke my heart, you beautiful bastards.