Spacekraft! Review

Developed and Published - Game Dev Garage

Gather crystals, repair/run crafting facilities, upgrade your spaceship, 

build machines, explore the open world, and find your way back to Mother Earth.

Spacekraft takes you on kind of an open-world adventure puzzle quest, all in a cute little rocket!

Complete the planets, and press on forward as you attempt to find your way back home. To Mother Earth.

Gameplay

There is a pretty nifty tutorial that will teach you the basics of flying around, using the ropes and magnets, as well as how to purchase Gas and health from the shop.

Not only that, it will also teach you how to upgrade your ship and collect the resources needed for currency.

The basic first planet is all one big tutorial, even though it feels more like a level 1 stage, and it is very easy to confuse yourself on where you need to fly too.

Moving on towards actual gameplay, you fly a mini rocket ship, that is pretty hard to control using a mouse and keyboard. Most times, you will end up crashing and damaging your ship.

Crash it too much, and you must reset from your previous save. There is an upgrade that you can buy in the shop that will prevent certain deaths once, and you can purchase armour as well from the same place.

You could also run out of fuel, which happens a lot if you are moving heavy stuff around and blasting full throttle to move things.

Since you have to buy things to progress your upgrades, you must find red or Blue crystals and suck out its precious resource, as of writing, I don't know if it regenerates after a certain amount of time, but it would be cool if it did.

These crystals are your currency to buy fuel, health and upgrades.

Navigation and flying in this game is hard that's for sure, I didn't know where to go to fix certain things like the power generator or the satellites, you do get some hint of direction with a small blue arrow, but only to major places.

In parts of puzzles, you don't get a navigation marker, who knew you had to use crystal in its raw forms to buy the antennas and generator... Not me.

If you feel that you need to sharpen your flying skills before taking on the main game, I would suggest checking out the Arcade section, which are short levels that may or may not improve your overall ability in the game.

Whatever you decide you want to try first, your priority is learning how to control that ship of yours.

The slightest touch of W forces the ship into full throttle, with a wicked drift and a very unsettling turn rate. Unless you go slow around planets you'll be fine, but if you are anything like me, I zoomed and mostly blew myself up... Hitting too hard against anything results in death.

Final Thoughts

The game itself is well-designed and it's also complex. With a great tutorial to lead you in before dropping you in the deep end. It's not immediately obvious in the direction.

Thankfully, there is some kind of mission direction, but for the most part, you will be figuring it out yourself. It took me an hour before I finished the tutorial stage planet...

I would highly, VERY highly recommend that you play the training in Arcade mode, it had super useful information that I didn't find out until I revisited it.

The graphics are well made and the sounds are also great sounding.

Rating

I would rate this a 3.

I rated it like this mostly for the ship control which I found to be exhausting trying to control its movement, and the lack of direction after completing the tutorial area.

Of course, you still have a mission route, but still is pretty unclear.

(5 being the absolute best)

Links

Steam