SPAZ is old school space shooting, combined with every modern gameplay element that can possibly be combined with it.
ies, or SPAZ, is a unique combination of genres, as much as it is a unique combination of elements in the title. You are Pirates in Space who fight Zombies. But this odd combination doesn't do justice to the truly immense amount of gameplay ideas stuffed into this game. MinMax games is a two man studio, dedicated to the love of the top-down space-shooter genre, and so SPAZ is one of those games that is enjoyable, on the basis it was made by people who love fun games.
SPAZ is an RPG, a 2D shooter, a strategy game, and much more miscellaneous sub genre's rolled into one. You will start the game with a fleet of a couple small crafts, and learn the basics from a very comprehensive tutorial. You mine resources from rocks to build more ships, which can be used to blow up other ships and get more data and impressed crew (known as "goons") to fill your ships. The actual ship combat is the game's main focus. You build up a fleet of a maximum of 4 ships of different sizes, with the ability to choose based on different attributes, a myriad of upgrades for each, and a diverse tech tree for further specialization. You'll engage in combat in order to complete the game's main quests, and in order to clear blockades that allow you to advance to different start systems, on your ultimate goal to reach the center of the galaxy. The combat is both based on skill and tactics. If go into a battle outgunned and without sound tactics, you will repeatedly lose your ships until you are out of resources to build more, and are forced to slowly mine and grind up more in order to rebuild your fleet. Tactics range from how you build up your fleet, to in game commands to friendly ships. You may have fast agile fighters with shields to distract the enemy and pick away their shields, and a slow cloaked bomber that surprises the enemy with a huge bomb or mines once the enemy is caught off guard. You may want to cloak your entire fleet, and replace your weapons with extra crew space and engines, so you can sneak up on enemy crafts and incapacitate them by launching borders. Or go for a offense-heavy strategy, with missiles, canons, and beams and use each to take out hull, armor, and shields by directly controlling the use of weapons by command.
The myriad of possibilities makes combat supremely enjoyable, but inevitably, you'll find yourself grinding up resources to get these upgrades and specials ships that make the game fun. This can make SPAZ a game that is slow to reach its full potential. Mining for resources at a station is a boring, tedious exercise. However, some side-quests can change things up and make the more menial tasks interesting for a bit. Sometimes you will find events such as a passing asteroid, in which you will have to carefully have your ships destroy a fast-moving volatile asteroid without getting them destroyed, so you can get all the resources and data that come out. If you need to acquire more crew and don't want to grind up the resources to purchase more, you can find a "Cheap Space Motel" mission, which is a bit less boring, and much quicker than other methods of gaining crew. There is enough variety in many other missions to make the RPG elements of SPAZ better, but I was still itching for a more enjoyable way to mine rez or fill my ships with goons, especially when none of these extra missions where in sight.
Though the RPG/4X elements of SPAZ can be much weaker than the space combat, there is a surprisingly addictive element of the game that makes you actually want to mine for resources and data- upgrading and getting new ships. Sure, mining rez can be slow, and destroying enemy ship patrols over and over can get dull, but every time you unlock a new weapon, and a new ship to try it on, there emerges a whole slew of new strategies to try out. SPAZ boasts a very large number of ships, and promises more with subsequent updates. It is great fun to finally destroy enough enemy ships to reverse engineer one of theirs as your own and turn the tables on them with a brand new bomber or large freighter. The only downside to this is some ships aren't properly balanced, and become completely obsolete once you unlock a better ship of the same size, causing some of this variety to wear off as soon as you get a chance to try it out. Your only incentive to return to some of these ships is when you are low on resource and you cannot afford the better version, but in these cases, you are usually already losing a battle, and using the last of your resources to send in another crappy ship isn't going to change anything. I'm still not sure what purpose a ship called the "Array" serves. It looks cool, but is completely useless.
SPAZ is a very long game with a large amount of replayability, thanks to randomly generated galaxies. As you navigate the galaxy, you are frequently forced to choose certain routes based on needs. If you find your fleet crippled, you may be more inclined to choose a galaxy whose residents are more friendly to you. If you are low on crew, you may want to find a galaxy with a colony to go buy some more goons. Sometimes you have multiple problems, and must make a choice on which is more important. You can't really lose in SPAZ, but a couple wrong choices can force you to spend a lot of time regrouping before you can break through more enemy blockades as you advance through the galaxy. It would be nice, however, if there were some more incentive to making the right choices, other than avoiding a painful hour of resupplying and regrouping.
A huge plus on SPAZ's part is the extreme ease of modding. I found I could open the image files of ships with a program simple as Paint, and I already plan on pimping my ships out with some sweet paintjobs. I have yet to see a tremendous amount of mod support on the developer's part, (need some tutorials and readme files!), but from what is in the data folder, creating new ships should be a relative breeze, and the promise of free developer updates (new bounty-hunter missions!) means SPAZ will likely keep growing to keep fans interested up into the next installment. It seems I've dumped on many negatives of SPAZ in this review, but I can't stress how the seemingly smaller amount of positives more than make this a great game. SPAZ is more than the sum of its parts, which is saying a lot, because it has many, many parts. There is hardly a genre untouched in this homage to old school top-down space shooters that gives a nod to all the excellent modern gameplay advances we enjoy today.
Overall Score: 8.0