Space Run is all about transporting precious cargo from A to B as fast as possible, while battling off waves of asteroids and pirates. It’s a tower defense game but, instead of having to just guard a static base, you’re protecting various types of cargo that you’re contracted to deliver. You play as Buck Mann, veteran space dude who’s somewhat reminiscent of Han Solo in his gruff, no fear attitude. Your android assistant is Addam-12, who is the ‘voice’ of the events taking place in battle (like Eva in Command & Conquer). Addam’s unique android views of your actions are also the basis for some good spoken humor.
Like most tower defense games, exceedingly few of which I have played by the way (it’s a genre I have yet to really make time for), the concept of Space Run is simple, but becoming proficient, much less a master of it, is a stout challenge. This isn’t because of a steep learning curve or difficult controls or a bad interface, although the Engineering area could have been designed a little better. The difficulty lies in understanding all of your equipment, making the best use of your time-limited special attributes, knowing when to tactically power-off your thrusters, and just having the skill to manage everything in rapid fashion. Using the optional keyboard mapping for Repairs or Item selection starts to get a little more important about a couple of hours into the game, which is otherwise almost completely mouse-controlled. Of note, gamepads are not supported it seems, although I don’t imagine they would work quickly enough to do the job once the challenge starts to really pick up.
For me, Space Run started getting challenging after about two hours. There are boss encounters with Space Pirates that will test your meddle and the cargo your carrying gets more difficult to manage. Nuclear Star, for example, wants you to transport their nuclear waste. Buck can care less what it is he’s transporting, but knowing that the sh*t blows up when it’s HP meter runs out, damaging nearby constructions, becomes a point of strategy you have to account for when the asteroids and enemies start flying in (and they will — oh, they will). VIP Travel has you actually transporting rich people — they want the best views from your ship, so you can only position them on the edges, obviously the most dangerous place for cargo to sit because its the edges of your ship that are going to get hit first. Then you have the mysterious entity known as Out of This World that loads your ship up with cargo that actually hinders your constructions, making you all the more vulnerable.
Getting from A to B has rarely been such a challenge, but that’s not to say the game is overly difficult or a pain in the ass. Sure, on many occasions I really would have liked to have been able to maybe just drop in one savegame or perhaps reach a checkpoint that I could restart from, but alas, I’ve not seen anything like that yet (for as far as I have played through). Instead, when your cargo is all blown away or you’re going too slow, or if the command center (known as the bridge) gets destroyed, it’s game over. You’re taken back to the start of the run to try again, and I have to say, the load times for Space Run aren’t the quickest, even on my humble gaming machine that exceeds the requirements easily (almost embarrassed to type this but it’s a E8400 @ 3Ghz, 8GB DDR1600, Radeon 4850 1GB… upgrading in Fall, finally…).
The flow of Space Run is accessible and works great. You start off with just a single contract from “Big Cargo,” and they just have some basic stuff for you to move. After accepting the job you are taken to the ship loadout phase in which you are required to place the cargo, a thruster, and a power station or two on your ship. Each tile of the ship is hexagonal, with some objects requiring multiple hexagons, like the twin-laser cannons or the cargo from VIP Travel. Once you’re loaded up, the job begins — you’ll want to go as fast as possible to the destination, but thrusters are fairly expensive so you can’t spend all your money there, lest you get shot down by competition and/or pirates, or smashed by asteroids. Anyway, assuming you make it to the other side, your Reputation goes up, based upon the speed of your work, primarily. As it goes up, other clients want to hire you for their transportation needs. Fortunately, this means that you usually have at least two available jobs to choose from, so if one is driving you nuts you can usually focus your efforts on a different job. The premise remains the same, but the challenge, and thus your strategy, vary quite a bit from job to job. In between jobs, you can visit the Engineering area to purchase upgrades and to review details on the various objects you encounter in space, which include not only enemy ships and drones, but friendly ships too (which you can actually destroy for various boosts, usually credits). Upgrades come in a variety of forms, giving you permanent enhancements for some items, like the ability to Re-orient laser cannons, or Special Abilities, like enabling a Wide Angle targeting system for the missile launchers, or a repair ability for one of the defensive constructions that can fix up neighboring objects.
Space Run will keep you own your toes to be sure. There’s always some type of action to be doing, whether it’s Reorienting laser cannons to deal with threats that are inbound (you have a radar that alerts you to incoming threats, including both the type, approximate number, and its distance from you), tactically disabling Thrusters (slows you down for about a minute, but you earn credits during that time), or building new power stations. What’s interesting is that you can slow the action down somewhat by disabling thrusters, but you have to be weary of going too slow or you will fail the job. Ultimately, I think Passtech Games has done a stellar job (har har) of balancing tower defense gameplay with a slick, fresh twist while also creating some great characters along the way.
With that, let’s get to the summary…
