A perfect 'time waster' game if you need to play something for a few minutes. It's essentially a rogue-like with some strategic elements where you find artifacts/lifeforms to take back home (for money), weapons/shields/etc to outfit your ship (and any allies you may acquire) with, and battle with hostile races. Will you return home in time to reap the rewards and retire, or will you end up as space dust in a battle gone horribly wrong?

Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space is a hybrid roguelike game of space exploration, adventure and starship combat set within a peculiar as-yet-unvisited region of the galaxy known as the Purple Void. Each time you play the game, a new and different "instant space opera" is generated at random; from locations of stars and nebulae to plot-twisting quest events, nothing stays the same.


But unlike other games of its kind that go on for dozens of hours, Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space plays to its conclusion in less than thirty minutes - it's the perfect lunch break game! Features also include a fully animated star map, a unique turn-based movement system, real-time starship battles, award-winning music and sound, and a robust battle simulator. Weird Worlds also has built-in support for community-created mods that can change anything and everything in the game!

Weird Worlds is another indie bundle game I stumbled upon. For a 2005 game, this is a pretty decent rouge-like space exploration and combat adventure game. After playing FTL quite a bit, it's pretty obvious where FTL got a lot of its ideas from. Much of the gameplay is very similar although the combat of Weird Worlds is overly complicated. It's kind of like SPAZ combat in some respects, but without the intuitiveness. The game does provide a combat simulator that allows you to practice as needed, but to win it's more about what equipment you have as opposed to using any real strategy.

Weird Worlds biggest shortcoming is the lack of a proper reward system since you don't really have to earn anything. You just take items as you find them or if you find the right trader you can exchange some cheap trash for the best equipment in the game. Also you are not forced into combat and can retreat anytime. Where FTL creates an environment of urgency, Weird Worlds creates an environment of casualness and I'm not sure casualness and rogue-like is a winning combination. Essentially you are given a specific amount of time to explore and collect as much loot as possible and eventually get killed or retire and get a score based on several factors.

The randomness makes it fun from an exploratory perspective, but it's not really a game that captivates for replayability.

In this game you return to infinite space. The worlds in the game are weird.

Buy? Unlikely...Maybe. It's a space exploration roguelike, where you're expected to die often and your luck throughout the game is completely randomized. The goal is to accrue enough value through what you find in star systems, cargo. passengers, and equpment with in a limited. You start with a ship with inferior gear, and need to make trades or kill hostiles to get better weapons or more valueable trading goods. Usually, but not always, you will find a bird race early in your tavels that are willing to trade any item regardless of value, which helps you get better gear or more valuable cargo. You will encounter "unknown" beings at other systems, which more often than not are hostile encounters with enemies that will out gun you. You don't want to travel through nebulae as they take much time to move through, unless you have the proper equipment. This game has simplistic mechanics which actually turn out quite enjoyable, but my problem is that it's too damn random and you have to basically hope that the game gives you a good galaxy. I don't like the idea of wasting time dying and getting low scores because of "what mood the game was in" when it generated a world for me. If you're into space exploration and/or roguelikes, you might like it because there is enjoyable gameplay, but success through extreme randomness is not what I want to deal with.