Review: The Spatials
The Spatials is a space simulation game by Weird and Wry - available on Steam.
In true Star Trek style, in The Spatials, you control a set of officers. Doctors, engineers, scientists, etc. all dress in the typical colors of blue, red, and yellow. You have been chosen to build a space station on the surface of some unknown planet. You decide which rooms you want to build and your officers go to work building them. You need a place for them to sleep, a warehouse for storage, a kitchen, a dining area, a garden to relax in, and as you progress further in the game, you unlock more rooms you can build. You can also build a spaceport so visitors can come and that makes the rooms more important to build because if there’s nothing for the visitors to do, they’ll be disappointed and will go home and tell everyone you suck. I assume that’s what they’d do. Unless they burn up on re-entry.
Eventually you can build little shops your visitors can buy stuff from and factories to produce the stuff you’re selling in the shops. But of course, to make stuff, you have to collect resources. Did you know space pizza is made from bugs? It’s true. You send your crew out on missions to various planets to collect what you need. Each mission awards you resources such as water, bugs, or oil. It also gives every officer XP and you might pick up some loot like new weapons or upgrades.
The Spatials addictive and love the look of it and its cute little cartoon people walking around. The combat system is simple. It’s just a great overall game. Except… as with every other game that’s come out recently, there’s little to no instruction on how to play, nor is there a guide. If the game isn’t going to at least be intuitive, then they should make an in depth help guide or have a tutorial that says more then “to build things you build things and then you hire officers and explore things and do stuff and stuff and things”. Yeah, that’s the object of the game so I already figured that part out. Thanks for nothing, tutorial! It took some searching through forums, asking questions, and watching YouTube videos to figure out what I needed to do. Which sucks, but again, it seems the standard in games these days. I don’t need to have everything about a game handed to me, but if I can’t figure out what to do by playing it, that’s frustrating.
Overall, the game is a lot of fun. Since you have to keep up on resources and making things to keep your officers AND your visitors happy at the same time, there’s enough going on to keep you playing. The more you play, the more things are unlocked. Gameplay is easy once you know what you’re doing. I would rate it higher then a 7 except I’ve never been more frustrated in trying to figure out how to play a game. The tutorial robot is useless and I have to include that in my rating.
