| Space Trader for WindowsJay French | Space Trader for Windows is a space-trading (doh) game. You control a ship and, with your limited resources, buy and sell goods from different planets and systems in an effort to reach your ultimate goal: buy your own personal moon and retire wealthy.
At first it sounds like fun. You can roam freely between planets, occasionally encountering different types of "enemies" (depending on your style of play). Should you choose to be an honest merchant, be very afraid of pirates, who will prey on you and get stronger as you get richer. If you choose to deal with illegal goods, beware of police ships, which you will occasionally encounter.
When buying goods, you have to take into consideration the politics of the planet, the current events, and the state of other planets you wish to trade with. The strategy is the usual with these types of games - buy low, sell high.
You can upgrade your ship to different ship types (there are several), and you can also buy upgrades for the ship you own - Different guns and shields, size upgrades, etc.
The downside is you do all of these fun things within a spreadsheet-like interface. If you read my previous review on The General, the spreadsheet interface was more a necessity than a flaw; in Space Trader, it is the opposite. When traveling to other planets, encounters with other ships are just message boxes with 3 buttons. Your ship is represented by a very small icon. No sound or music whatsoever, just multiple windows of text, icons and buttons.
All in all, Space Trader may be worth the downbload only because of its small size. It may hold your interest for the most of 5 minutes, but playing it will only make you realize how well other games have implemented the Space-Trading genre. You are better off playing Elite in DOSBox.
NOTE: I understand that the game was ported from the Palm OS. I have actually played a version in Windows Mobile, and it was a lot of fun... for a Mobile game. But on the Desktop, expectations are much higher, and porting a game as-is without any changes to take advantage of the platform is what took this game from legendary on the Palm OS down to mediocre on the Desktop PC. |
| |
