Space Pirates and Zombies is a top-down shooter set in a randomly generated universe that’s size is of your choosing. We follow the adventures of a ragtag group of pirates as they try to get off Earth and explore the center of the universe in the hopes of finding its fabled treasures. Right from the get-go they manage to nearly blow up their mothership and wiped out most of their blueprints on how to build weapons as well as ships, giving you a good indication of your tough journey ahead. Early game, your main worries will be trying to please either of the two factions in order to buy some tech or simply destroying their ships to slowly reverse engineer knowledge on how to build it.
Most of your opportunities to please one faction require you to upset the other, so you’ll rarely find yourself in a system without someone itching to kill you. These two opposing forces are the Civilians and the militaristic UTA forces that guard the entryways to other systems. That specific quirk of the UTA ensures they are usually the ones you gun down, since the only way to peacefully travel elsewhere is to max out relations with them and then offer them a substantial bribe afterward. It would be less of a problem if their relations remained the same throughout, but each system has their own opinion of you despite how little sense it makes. You could hop into a system with your relations already maxed out even if you’ve never been there, or with both immediately disliking you, it is completely random. This makes dealing with the UTA more trouble than its worth and blasting apart their troops stationed to guard entryways to save yourself the time.
Since the over-world galactic map is linear in where you can go, it would have made much more sense if rumors of your deeds slightly affected the systems they are directly connected to, instead of relations being completely random for each. There is a third pseudo faction known as Bounty Hunters who will send out hit squads if you get enough of a bounty on your head. They are only found in some solar systems and can also hunt you from nearby ones. Destroying any ship for whatever reason from either faction will add to your bounty, making them an unavoidable obstacle unless you pay off all the cash you are worth. Considering how much time you will spend fighting, that will quickly add up, so like the rest of the factions, its best to ignore them. The entire faction system of this game is completely insane and does end up harming the experience more than helping it.
Your three main resources will be Rez which is used as money, Goons being your crew, and Data that is essentially experience points. Rez can be gained from completing missions or farming asteroid fields that produce an infinite amount of the stuff. Goons can be bought on certain stations if that faction is friendly enough not to shoot you on sight, or from escape pods of destroyed ships. Not everyone will want to join you and those that don’t are tossed back out into space without their pods. You can also sell them if you want and are the only “currency” you can use as bribes. Finally, you have Data. Not much to be said about it other than it functions exactly like an experience system and gets you points to place in one of your many categories once you level up. These range from strengthening your shields to being able to equip better weapons/equipment of the category you invest in.
Each ship has a number of specific slots where you can equip varying things and you can upgrade their engines, armor, as well as the energy reactor core. Some will be straight upgrades to their existing equipment, but also makes it more costly to rebuild in case it gets destroyed. Others like armor will also affect their overall speed, making it a trade-off between durability and maneuverability. It’s a neat system that offers many ways to personalize each individual ship. It can take quite some time to get to that point due to how grindy this game is made to be. You don’t buy tech outright, you buy a blueprint which discovers a portion of what you seek. It will take many trips through different systems to find parts, and once you ensure they like you enough to sell it in the first place. You’ll never find anything from fighting or as a reward for doing missions.
All you get from fighting is Data and the ability to reverse engineer any ship should you not have it yet. It starts to feel rather pointless since you can mine Rez, which is far more profitable than any mission and takes less time, then buy a good amount of the other two resources making them feel less valuable. Combat takes place on a 2D plane meaning you can’t move up or down. Your turning speed and other factors vary depending on the size & weight of your vessel. If it has automated turrets, you don’t have to aim, though at the cost that they do take some time to turn around, making it hard to nail a fast enemy. With manual aiming weapons, you’ll have to position your ship instead of simply clicking on the fire button until your energy runs out. It gets more in-depth than that such as beam weaponry firing in contained bursts, making it dangerous to turn around when allies are nearby as you can damage them, or dropping mines which is equally as hazardous to anyone caught in their blast.
It’s a solid combat system with a considerable flaw that drags it down. The camera is far too zoomed in. Most of your time will be spent blindly flying around whether you are in a fight or not. Simply finding a shipwreck to retrieve all the goodies that they dropped is a real pain and since many of the resources such as goons & rez disappear over time, you won’t even be bothered to after some time. Thankfully ship blueprints have an indicator on them so you can easily find them whether you were the one that killed them or not. The real salt in the wound here is that fights do not keep your incredibly small view distance in mind, enemy AI can spot you from a mile away and will constantly be attacking you from off-screen. This becomes even worse as your AI is engaged with them and you haven’t the slightest clue what is going on.
Your AI comrades are more of a nuisance than anything. Despite any of your orders, they are all too happy to fly across the map to fight a ship they have no hopes of defeating and require constant babysitting. You do have a tactical map to give them orders but whether they ever follow them is questionable. It gets even worse than that believe it or not. As amazing as the introduction of the zombies was, your fleet will have you pulling your hair in no time as they fire into what are effectively biological mines at point blank range and causing no shortage of problems. Since you do not play as any character, you can respawn as any of your ships, even if they are all destroyed given you have the Rez. As long as you keep your warp-point safe and have funds, you can fight a war of attrition. The only way to actually lose the game is from a few specific main missions.
Main missions are more than worth your time since the only way to upgrade your mothership called the Clockwork is via story progression. You are severely crippled by ignoring them since its hangers depend on the size and amount of ships you can have in your fleet. As an added bonus, the characters and story are pretty decent. Rushing straight to them is a mistake however, it fully expects you to grind like crazy beforehand for basically every mission, just to have a decent chance of completing it without spamming ships until achieving victory. It really does push your tolerance in completing pointless busywork all throughout and it only gets worse. At one point in the game, humanity decides to step up and take the fight to the zombie menace which was an awesome change of pace. It is a surprising change of pace that gives you quite a bit of control over this new federation, though is plagued by yet another awful grind to complete.
Space Pirates and Zombies is a unique title that simply stretches its content much too far. It is also plagued with flaws in critical aspects of it like its combat, faction system, and distribution of loot to drive you forward. I’ve failed to mention many of its mishaps like being able to fly right through asteroids and other junk, robbing you of the chance to at least have some cover from all those off-screen projectiles. The UI not scaling to higher resolutions and may even be a tad too small at 1080p, enemies randomly fleeing to the ends of the massive battle screens forcing you to waste time as you chase after them, and more. We’d be here all day. It does have its bright points and my opinion of it is obviously in the minority since it currently sits at a Very Positive rating on Steam. There is a demo available, which I applaud it for, and you should give a shot beforehand to get a taste for yourself if you find it the least bit interesting.
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