SPAZ 2 is an excellent game that I highly recommend. The action oriented gameplay will keep the casual gamer entertained while the strategy, resource management, ship design, variety of weapons/components, factions, and options allows players to go as deep as they wish.

For a game in early access with a two person development team, SPAZ 2 comes off as highly polished and immensely playable (Triple A gaming companies should take notes). In the 50+ hours I have played so far, I have experienced no bugs, crashes, framerate chugging, visual artifacts, or any other evidence of cut corners or rushing. The user interface is clean and intuitive. The controls feel tight and responsive. Ship combat is extremely satisfying (immersive battles with multiple enemies and allies, battle damage, beautiful explosions / debris, vibrant graphics, unique and memorable art and scenery, unique weapons allowing a variety of approaches to combat). The sandbox mode allows you to customize your experience from the vanilla story mode as well.

The development team is very responsive to the community and attentive to any reasonable criticisms. At this point, updates are mostly adding final touches to the game as well as community requested additional content and features - not desperate hot fixes to address game breaking bugs.

I found the tutorials and story mode satisfying as well. However, I believe the promised addition of voice acting will significantly enhance the story.

Criticisms:

- Some weapon symbols in the inventory menus are difficult to distinguish from one another.
- The number of ships allowed per battle encounter seems low.
- For those looking to maximize their ship's threat, the ship design is limited.
- After the zombie threat is dealt with, no other equal or greater challenges / events appear (I usually start a new playthrough shortly after).
- Max level starbases are incredibly strong when attacked directly by the player, but are laughably easy to destroy when attacked by the A.I.

I really had to strain to come up with these criticisms. They are the smallest nitpicks and trifles surrounding a solid and gloroius core. Considering the price, current content, and developer dedication, you can't go wrong. Just buy it already.

If you liked SPAZ 1, but disliked the grind, go play SPAZ 2.
If you prefer tactical play in the form of Sid Meier's Starships, with a good portion of hands-on fighting in between, go play SPAZ 2.
If you like slaving away min-max'ing your ship until it becomes the most powerful build it can be (for now), go play SPAZ 2.

That said, coming from SPAZ 1 originally, I really like the new look. The music is great. The gameplay is solid. The 2 man dev team is busy pumping out patch (hotfixes) after patch (features).

The only (slightly) dark shadow is the beginning of the game.. the learning curve seems a bit steep as the game is now. But the devs have this topic on their roadmap already.

If you like an Early Access game with actually active developing, go buy SPAZ 2 and enjoy the ♥♥♥♥ out of it. Oh, and there are zombies ;-)

Give SPAZ2 about an hour to get its hooks into you. Once you're through the opening sequence (that, note, starts with a fake Game Over) you're into the world proper. As with Starpoing Gemini 2, Rebel Galaxy and others of its ilk, you'll manage resources, kill things, and grow your capabilities.

It's the ship building that elevates this though... the ability to complete pull apart your ship and pop on new weapons or engines or whatever else there is. Flying around in a garbage pile has never been so much fun.

Also the writing is hilarious! It's just that the voices are computerised at the moment but expect that to change at some point.

Try it, it's fantastic :)

SO MANY UPDATES!
I played the first spaz and fell in love with it instantly.
This game has so much pontential that im fine loosing another 2-3 years of having no life to play this game :D

Great game, absolutely love the constant humor injected intot he game EVERYwhere, find myself laughing of the simplest NPC comments like NOPE nope, game play is fun, some bugs that are being worked out, but if your saying not to buy then your wrong, either support the team to help make the game better if you like or just stop gaming. Dev crew is constanting working on adding features and additional content while cleaning code, fixing bugs, this is a great game with a great and dedicated dev crew behing them.

SPAZ 2 is definatly worth the price. I am a huge SPAZ 1 fan and coming into this i was pretty excited. It is its own game and I wouldnt compare it TOO much too SPAZ 1 although it shares a lot of the atmosphere that I loved about SPAZ 1. This game seems to be more focused on ships and mothership battles. The games graphics are pretty good and I like the animations ect. The game is very ambitious and I think they do well overall. New comers and old fans ought to both be satisfied. I played and beat the storyline on whatever the defualt difficulty is and experimented with ship building for a total of about 35-40 hours gameplay. The game does not really feel like its lacking anything major to be able to come out of early release, although there are a few minor complaints, and most of those are already admitted to being addressed by the Devs! These guys are great!

Through my playtime the game crashed once and I am not really sure if you can blame the game or my rig or Windows, I wasnt devestated by it, the game autosaves often. I did however notice something that may be worth pointing out. I play on a 34" Acer curved screen @ 3440x1440. In massive battles with tons of strike crafts and carrier attachments and 3+ huge motherships my FPS would dip down to 35 - 40 sometimes. 95% of the time I stayed at my max setpoint of 75FPS though. With all the tons of pieces and attachments and different types of weapons it can take about 10 hours to get the hang of building a well balanced mothership if you dont look at any guides or read any walkthroughs(I didnt), these may help some people out more than others.

Basic specs for comparison.

Xeon 1270V3 CPU
Radeon R9 ASUS STRIX Fury (OC)
32 GB Ram
950 PSU
Acer 34" 3440x1440

Already a worthy successor to SPAZ.

I devoured this game, this game was my b*tch until 4 in the morning for a week straight. so do i recommend this game? heck yeah!

I want to preface this review by saying that not only am I a big fan of the original SPAZ, I also respect and admire MINMAX for experimenting with their original model and stepping outside the box for their sequel.

That being said, I think they stepped out of one box and into another.

SPAZ 2 retains the charmingly witty-yet-stupid writing and dialogue of the original game that reminds of a Saturday-morning cartoon. The aesthetics have also remained the same; blurry textures composed of screamingly high contrast colors that bore into your retinas. On top of that, the from-scratch gameplay is also retained from the original game, where you start with practically nothing and build your empire on top of that. Aside from the actual space combat, these things define SPAZ pretty well, and if that's all you're looking for, you won't be disappointed.

This is all SPAZ 2 has in common with the original, however. In the transition to 3d, much has changed. You now get to fly and build the mothership, you are now the biggest fish in the sea. Right Hooks and Tugs are tiny compared to the hulking, glorious piece of junk that is your ship. You start off with a scaffold looking like it was built entirely out of old bicycles by an inpatient from a mental hospital. Over the course of the entire game, from start to finish, you will upgrade from bicycles to smashed car-shaped objects.

This modular mothership, along with the ability to establish and govern starbases, seems to be giving us what we didn't have, and wanted in the original SPAZ. An interstellar empire. Flying the Clockwork. AI that don't run face-first into the enemy's largest ship and die instantly, wasting thousands of Rez. Actually, that's still a thing, but they only waste small amounts of scrap instead because they're only piloting small fighter ships.

This lends a much more strategic feel to the game. And I'd call that an advantage. However, much was lost in the transition:

First of all, everything feels like it's about the same size. Gone are the days of warping into a battlefield and attempting to take down a ship 20 times your size with bombing runs. The smallest mothership is maybe 1/4 the size of the largest. Heck, even space stations just look like circular, spinning motherships that can't move.

Next, ship design doesn't matter as much. In the original, when you were restricted to chassis with a set number of module slots and module types, you knew exactly how your own ships worked, and their strengths and weaknesses. When you looked at an enemy ship, you could distinctly see what modules were attached to it (unless it was cloaked), and you knew how those weapons would affect your fleet. What weapons a ship had often determined whether you'd try to take it down for its blueprints, or flee with your tail between your legs.

Now, you pretty much slap whatever module will fit on your mothership and has the most stars. Because of the randomness of parts, both in terms of their perks (the bonuses they confer to your ship, like shield strength, speed, health, etc.), and in terms of the weaponry on them (cannons, beams, the works), both when you're scavenging, and when you're shopping at space stations, it's very unlikely that you're going to find exactly the part you're looking for.

I get what they were going for here; you're a scavenger among scavengers. It's not about what you want, it's about what works. But, that being said, it isn't very compelling. The chances of me finding a part that: a) looks the way I want it to look, b) has a weapon that I want on it, and c) has the bonuses that I want (which I don't even keep track of anyways), is almost null. The chances of me finding *multiple parts* that I actually want are nonexistant.

This results in your mothership EITHER looking like a piece of trash, that has EITHER nice weapons OR nice stats, OR a mothership that looks nice and is completely worthless in terms of battlefield effectiveness. Yes, that was a nested either-or statement. And, usually, what ends up happening is you get a muddy mix of all of these things.

The end result is that you don't feel like the ship you're flying is *your* mothership, even though you built it piece-by-piece. It feels like you just cobbled together what the game gave you and now you're flying it around.

And, all of these things would be fine if they took advantage of the things they gained; We're in 3d now. There's a lot to explore, right?

Not... Really. You still fly your ship in 2d, while asteroids hover tantalizingly over and under you. You still effectively fight in 2d; you can't go over or under an enemy ship. The battles are more bland than the original game. Explosive barrels don't matter as much, and neither do asteroids. They feel much more staged, 2-4 ships warp in, 1-3 ships warp out. The outcome is largely determined by your stats, and who warps in with you. Positioning can matter, but ships are so random and cobbled together that it's hard to tell when you're facing directly into an enemy's broadside, or if the other side is even worse. You can't "get used to" an enemy faction. You can't take advantage of a ship's slow turning speed and its blind spots. You really can't dodge missiles anymore. There is no longer a cloaking system (except for in the star map, where it doesn't really matter), and "big" weapons like Mass Bombs don't feel as significant.

That's what it is. A lot of elements have lost their character. Rez is no longer the rainbow-colored candy it was, now it's just a generic purple blob that you pick up. Finding a new color of Rez stone felt like moving to a different level. Things are worth more now. Ships are bigger. Now it's just numbers on a screen.

Goons have gotten even less important. You no longer scavenge for rescue pods, or steal from hotels; just numbers on a screen. You need to maintain a minimum number of goons, and you shouldn't have too manygoons.

Finding the last blueprint to a weapon you really want is no longer a thing. Sometimes you stumble across a part that has a unique weapon on it, and you get to use that one part, and you will never find that same weapon ever again. And if you do, it's going to be on a worthless part.

The game feels smaller. You can cross the whole starmap in a matter of minutes, faster towards the start of the game and slower towards the end (the opposite of the original game), and you probably won't be attacked.

It's not a bad game. I just don't see why I would play it over the original SPAZ, which has much more crisp, interesting RPG gameplay and gunplay. Or Istrolid, which offers the modularity and customizability of SPAZ 2 with much faster, more satisfying top-down gameplay. Or why I would play it over Dreadnought, or Fractured Space, which are full-blown third person space shooters with interesting tactical gameplay and the advantage of other players.

SPAZ 2 seems to be a mashup of various genres, and sadly, it doesn't work, at least not for me.

Really like this game, just missing end game depth. Once you have the best items things get boring real quick.
The main quest is poor and basicly consists of all the things you do in sandbox mode, nothing special added ....

Combat is good and fun, but really lacks tactic depth. Once you figure out how things works it comes down to flying arround and boosting shields at the right moment, the autotarget does everything for you.

Get this game for 15-20 hours of fun and keep your fingers crossed waiting for the multiplayer.