Spaceships, it turns out, are kinda hard to operate. NASA aren’t sending folks up in shuttles all alone, after all. Released today, Bomber Crew follow-up Space Crew is a tactical management game that tasks you with the smooth operation of an interstellar starship, daring you to keep the lights on with slightly too-few crewmates while aliens remind you how desperately thin the hull plating is.
Think Homeworld, but if you only had one ship and had to manually go make all the tiny space buds onboard turn on the engines and put out the fires.
Like Bomber Crew before it, Space Crew has you hectically ferrying a small crew around a ship in an increasingly panicked attempt to make the whole thing work. This time you’re in space, and while there may be a lot less anti-air flack up there, there’s also a whole lot less air and infinitely more alien laser blasters. Between missions, you upgrade your ship and train up your crew.
During missions, everything is on fire and you desperately need the engine not to explode.
Our Nate nipped into orbit for his Space Crew review, wherein he commanded fleshy, void-borne man-turned-ship The Transformed Man through the cosmos, growing more faces as it lost crewmembers. While the game might not offer quite the amount of freedom he’d have liked, it’s still a fun masterclass in controlled chaos.
“Space Crew makes you feel perpetually on the edge of catastrophic failure, but rarely tips you fully over,” Nate explained, probably while sewing another corpse into his horrifying flesh-ship. “It’s got that illusionist’s quality that makes you feel like a genius for getting out of any scrape: it’s the James T Kirk mindset, neatly packaged for consumption.”
Space Crew is out now on Steam for £17.99/€19.99/$19.99.
