ENGAGE!!!
After the pleasant World Destruction, SEGA releases another good RPG just made for fans of starships, hyperspace jumps and more… until to get where no men has gone before :)
Indeed the game is pretty peculiar too. Just to be clear Infinite Space follows a style of play between simulation and strategy similar to the ancient (but beautiful) Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday for SEGA Genesis, simplifying the simulative aspect favoring strategy and immediacy. Differently from the old SSI title in this game you will fight mainly aboard huge starships in frenzy battles. Unfortunately the game don't offers any ground explorations and the few melee battles are ruled by a rock/paper/scissors system really amazingly stupid.
Main plot is deliciously Sci Fi and, though not great, is however pleasant and easy to follow thanks even to a group of characters surely stereotyped, but well defined. However, since the plot cover a period of time pretty long (about 10 – 12 years) we'll see our character grow not only in physical look, but even in their attitudes. The story starts pretty slowly and uninteresting, but hour after hour become more and more engaging proponing some good ideas too and assuming epic tones.
We'll follow the journey of Yuri (usual RPG teen) escaping from his birthplanet to become later captain of a fleet of starship found himself involved in a lot of trouble and with a lot of people, including space pirates and similar. Events develop themselves simply jumping from a planet to another, getting optional jobs and unlocking main plot sections. This system should be simple, but sometimes after a cutscene you will have no hint where or when you need to go to continue with the story and be forced to roam aimlessy just to find an "hot spot".
The planet interaction is pretty limited; once landed you can count on a tavern, some service shops and eventually some special buildings keeping some type of special events. A higher grade of interactions would be surely appreciated.
Good part of the game run trough the space battles you'll encounter randomly during the movements between planets and by fixed events.
Fighting are lead strategically ship vs ship (or better: fleet vs fleet) following a hybrid turn and real time system recalling the active time battle 2.0 of games like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy X-2, with your ships and those of your opponent free to move back and forward on the battlefield (battlespace? lol) while waiting the charging of an action bar.
Once the battle gauge had reached a wished level (up to three) you could use it to unleash an attack or perform some special action. Basic commands see a normal attack with each of the weapons equipped to your ships (provided that each of them had the target in fire range); the barrage fire: a full force attack amazingly harmful; dodge: evasive move useful to avoid enemies barrages. In addition you'll have even a bunch of special commands available if you are using a certain ship or you have in the crew a specific character. Last (and least) the grubby melee command usable only when your ship is in close range to a enemy; it will start a melee fight in order to storm an enemy ship.
Though its simplicity the battle system results interesting, engaging and strategically significant while you try to reach a balance with attack and defense, falling back when you need time to charge the battle gauge and some second later going forward to enclose the enemy in your fire range.
A poor management of the fight from the player points out the merciless of the battle engine: enemies have more or less the same capacities and possibilities of the player, and if you are battling with a five ships fleet a single barrage is more than enough to destroy one of your starships depleting your attack force and victory's chance, and if your flagship go down is automatically game over. In other words, just a simple error or some bad luck missing some shots can easily takes to a crushing defeat.
In order to protect your main ship from enemy's fire you can choose to dislocate it on the rear side making it more difficult to hit; same for the enemies: an attack toward a second or a third line rarely get its target, forcing you to take care of the most unguarded ones first.
It's finally time to talk about the stupid melee system. Maybe the command was thought in order to keep a chance of victory even if your ship was on the verge of destruction. Once really close to an enemy ship the command will start a melee fight between the two crew following the basis of the rock/paper/scissors game. You can choose one of three attacks: shoot, leader, slash.
Shoot wins against leader and loses with slash; leader wins against slash and is weak against shot; slash wins against shoot but loses against leader. The attack is chose at the beginning of the brawl and later can be changed waiting for a battle gauge to replenish. A winning attack will decrease enemy's crew while if your command is outdone will be your army to be depleted. This system, already pretty dull and unengaging is worsened by an enemy AI highly skilled in preventing your moves (sometimes the enemies can appear even clairvoyant) making all more and more irritating.
Fortunately you can simply choose to totally ignore the melee fight, at least during space battles. In a couple of occasion you'll be forced to undertake some fixed melee battles, with all their consequences. This underline another flaw: the game is focused only on space battles; adventure and explorations are minimal and lack totally a ground battle system and a party management. In a similar game a ground adventure e battle systems, even simple, would exalted the simulative face of the experience, just like in Buck Rogers. Instead in Infinite Space are more important the ships customization and crew management that can count on two system handy but still powerful and detailed. In order to obtain new ships and components you must first gain blueprints (bought or found during adventure), later the project could be realized in a ship building facility (spending a lot of money). Every ship get a grid of empty spaces where you could insert new components adding new features and power ups. Beside the fixed presence of a command bridge and an engine you'll be free to customize your ship following your wish always if you'll have enough money and empty spaces (components are represented like tetris pieces). About the money, buy ships and components asks a lot of money and the best way to gain are the random battles you encounter during cruise, so the usual RPG farming is oriented in Infinite Space more in money acquisition than experience gaining, 'cause the benefit from characters level up are pretty limited and not much incisive on the gameplay. The great number of parts and the various bonus they provide can allow to create several type of ship and style game, but surely pay a lot, in term of reliability of the ship's performance, find a balance between attack/defense and livability.
Another exalting moment is the crew management. The ship offers several job slot where you can dislocate your crew members acquired during adventure or hired in a guild. Each characters is defined by a series of fixed abilities, higher is the numeric value of an ability and more effective it will be; however only a specific ability affect the ship behavior, depending from the job slot where he is put. A character with a control value of 25 and an artillery value of 2 will use the control ability only if assigned to a piloting post, otherwise if you set him on a gun he'll use the low value of the artillery bonus resulting barely useless. Moreover, some crew members get some special skills either passive, raising some ship features, either enabling some special commands. In both case the skill will enable itself only if the character is assigned to a specific job, so once again the correct placement of crew members assumes a great importance.
Let's return a moment on the difficult level of the game. Besides some really hard (either in space than on ground) battles and the system that can penalize an unlucky (or not much skilled) player, Infinite Space it shows merciless even in the adventure parts. Sometimes will happen to you to see a game over screen only selecting a wrong choice, without any clue that could be happen. My advice is to save often and keep a backup save, 'cause the game offers several critical choices, not only risking your life, but allowing you to obtain various ships, parts and even crew members. Branch system is surely interesting, but once picked a selection you could cry it several hours of play later especially because some of the branches could reveal them not only amazingly hard, but even bad structured (like the Zetonian quest… no spoiler, but is really awful, believe me). The lack of a backup save slot could even force a player stuck in a apparently impossible quest to give up on the entire game.
Final line
Fans of Sci Fi surely will have more than a reason to play this game and, certainly, Infinite Space is more oriented toward those consumers, anyway even other players could find exciting and engaging. Some doubts remain about the development of the main quest, relying to much on "hot spot" and objectives often elusive and not much clear, the lack of ground exploration, some fixed battles really hard and, finally, the horrible melee system. Moreover, though satisfying, some portions of the game are really much harder than others, creating dangerous imbalances where the poor player could feel really lost (in space?).
To those lacks the game answers with a good overall plot, maybe a bit slow, but plenty of good points; frenzy space battles with a system easy to learn but deep and strategically significant; ship customization and crew management systems really original, powerful and satisfying.
In the end SEGA surely do a good work with Infinite Space creating a game innovative (though taking example from some very old games) and enjoyable though its general difficulty.
At least the judgment is positive, but surely Infinite Space it is not a game for all.
Final Score: 7.5