I loved the original space run. This sequal seems like repetitive missions and multiplayer elements was added to make it last longer but it makes it last a bit TOO long. The diffuculty seems to shoot straight up by the time you hit the 3rd of 4 solar systems. I am very disapointed.

This game is nowhere near as good as its prequel. It has somehow made the Space Run experience feel like a grind. I don't think Space Run needed the MMO elements they added to this game, in fact, I think they detracted from the experience entirely. If you loved Space Run, consider this game when it goes on sale for < $5.

Space Run Galaxy is FANTASTIC.

It's astonishingly good. It boggles my mind just how poor the community outreach for this game is. I'm writing this right now in an effort to help correct this deficit. Because it's crazy.

When I googled "Space Run" and "Space Run Galaxy" the entire first page of hits is steam storefront pages and metacritic scores. NOT the company's pages. Not a domain for the game itself. Nothing. The second page of results halfway down gives you a facebook page. There is no subreddit. There is no forum presence anywhere whatsoever about this game.

Which is crazy because this game is GREAT. It's phenomenal. Knocked right out the park, into another park two states over, then bouncing into a third park somewhere on the east coast killing millions.

I had intended this morning to post what I felt were tips and tricks that I had learned over the last eightish hours playing the game and spending the whole day thinking about it in the intervals when I was not. However no such places seem to exist on the internet. I feel like somewhere in your company there exists an open position for a community manager. Especially considering how many people playing the game don't really seem to understand it. Communication seems to be missing somewhere. People need to know about this game.

Because most of what people are whining about, doesn't exist in the game. Or rather, it exists at the end of a puzzle because this is a puzzle game. Every mission is a puzzle how you are going to take your limited resources to meet the challenges of the game.

And it's TOUGH, and it's satisfying, and it leaves you hungry for more. It leaves salivating at the possibilities of what you could do if you just had a few more hexes. It you just had a few more bolts. Oh the places you'll go, the people you'll see.

There is a Civ City-esque fever of maximizing space, of placing a upgrader and a connector in the most perfect elaborate arrangement. The way you get to control the profits of your run by dynamically risking space on your ship in exchange for more rewards is straight out of PayDay. When you make your first haul of not 6 or 7 cargo containers, but 50 or more, you will hear the alarm bells of that jackpot.

Which leads me bending the two topics I've talked about so far. The community misunderstandings with, what I had wanted to write about, tips and tricks.

Because that 50 cargo run is only really possible with an active online community that knows how to use the online tools inside the game.

I was having some trouble with the second world, the Titan Galaxy, and so returned to the first galaxy to see if there was any way to move those materials I had gathered into the new world. There is not.

And that is unfortunate for I had many materials that where now locked behind me. However, in misfortune there is opportunity it seems. While the raw materials themselves cannot be transported across far reaches of the galaxy, money can. There are no stop signs for money. I could not move the goods, but I could move the "value" of the goods. I needed to sell them.

Here is where you need a community to make this feature truly shine. If I take my goods to the merchant I'm going to get rock bottom pricing. If I take it to the community, I can sell my goods for cheaper than the merchant would have you buy them and still make a healthy profit. The player who buys the goods is buying them at a lower price than they otherwise would have working with the merchant. Everyone wins. If there are players in the market, using the online community tools present in the game.

The same goes for missions and here is where I had some of the most fun of the whole game - but again seems to have exhausted itself because of the lack of community engagement. It's annoying how upgrade materials are landlocked to the planets in which they are acquired. This can be solved by creating multiplayer contracts to have your materials moved FOR you by other players. This system can be abused by relatively low level players to make massive cargo runs.

Yesterday morning, I found player made contracts to move 50 cargo units from the starting planet to a nearby low level planet. This run was a breeze. I delivered, without much complication 50 units of cargo on a walk in the park. The reward for delivering these goods was about 10,000 in straight cash and almost thirty upgrade materials. Again, I could not take these materials to the next zone - but even if I just ground them into the merchants mouth I was about to walk away with about 40,000 credits for a five minute walk in the park.

I did this about ten more times yesterday morning and made WAY more money than I had in the previous eight hours.

Then I hit a wall. I believe that I single handedly exhausted this game's entire supply of multiplayer contracts. Because they dried up. I was able to move hundreds of cargo in less than an hour and then for the rest of the day almost none. Contracts to move 3 or 4 units from an easy planet to something days away.

I told you there would be tips right? Don't do this. No one wants to move your 2 blue blocks five planets. Make your contracts neat and simple. Also ♥♥♥♥ing pay me if you're asking for something hard. If you don't want to put a bounty to move 50 cargo from easy to easy fine, the game pays me anyway, but no ones moving your 6 cargo from extremely difficult to batshit insane for free.





So I guess in review: incredible game. Buy it. But ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ guys we gotta work together out here. This game's not grindy if you work together. I'm not asking to get on your friends list, just make contracts and sales.

Like the original, only much bigger! That's not to say it's without its ups and downs...

The good: More content, no power generators, Component crafting, Customization, Focus resource, More weaponry, Adjacency cables
The bad: Random run configurations, Almost everyone is passive aggressive
The meh: You work for Buck Mann, Multiplayer content

Details:
More content: Where as Space Run had 30 levels, Space Run Galaxy features 80 levels that aren't static, and 141 single player missions to get stuff from A to B.

No power generators: Every construction you can build functions out of the box! You don't need to build power generators to use the higher tier equipment! There are upgraders to make them work more efficiently, but those are optional.

Component Crafting: To build anything on your ship, you need to get the component crafted by a mechanic. You bring them the materials and pay them Space Credits, and they increase the number of the component in question that you can build during a run. Given how it all works, the part I don't understand is why the mechanic's fees and required materials keep increasing! This is the source of the game's big grind, after all. You want a lot of components because you are only allowed to build the number you have crafted. When I say build, I mean trigger the construction of. If you recycle a construction, you only get 75% of the hexnuts used to build it minus damage. You don't recieve another of that construction to build somewhere else.

Customization: You get to color your ships however you like, and reconfigure the hexcell layout within the restrictions of the ship your working with.

Focus resource: The Focus resource is what you use to trigger the special abilities of your ship constructions. The first game used hexnuts for this.

More weaponry: There are a lot more weapons to work with in this game! Red offensive components have lasers and launchers, blue defensive components have anti-missile, decoy probes, and lightning guns, and green utility components have plasma weapons! Sadly, the only weapons that can be reoriented after being placed are the Twin Lasers, Plasma Cannons, and Heavy Missile Systems. Everything else is static once placed.

Adjacency cables: There are a lot of constructions that benefit things built next to them. The cables expand that influence to whatever is built next to them! With careful planning, everything on your ship can count as being next to eachother so that shield generators share the load of incomming attacks and your repair stations can work on everything on the ship! This has a bad habit of limiting cargo capacity, but therein lies the game. It's very satisfying to build an immortal ship!

Random run configurations: Despite what everyone is saying, the runs are NOT completely random. Each run has multiple configurations of what and how challenges are thrown at you, and that is randomly selected when you start the run. However, some of these configurations are much harder to complete than others because you have a very limited inventory of components, most of which can not be reoriented once placed.

Almost everyone is passive aggressive: This is in reference to the in game people who chatter at you constantly. Clearly this is a problem that runs rampant in the 26th century. These people need therapy, and it's demonstrated that they're all rich enough to get it! The worst offender is your AI companion throughout the game, Evve. She seems to take delight in your failures and is constantly surprised by your successes.

Working for Buck Mann: Buck is the kind of boss who sets unrealistic expectations and expects them to be met. He also refers to you as "Rookie" until you finish the final story mission of the game, which causes your customers to call you that too. This has no effect on gameplay, but it sure rubbed me the wrong way more than once!

Multiplayer content: The extent of the multiplayer content is transporting crafting material from one place to another. Most people don't seem to offer up any payment for this, but the game awards you with random stuff for each item transported.

With 70 or so hours in game, I have to say that im surprised that this title is garnering "mixed" reviews...

I understand what people are saying about this sequel being more grindy than the last but I have to disagree. I mean, yes, sometimes progress can be slow but I dont see the problem. I mean, I like indy titles because they can often offer some refreshingly novel mechanics. Space run is a prime example of this. The one thing that I dont like about some indy titles is that they will often only offer a few hours of gameplay before they show off all that they have to offer and I start looking at picking up new titles. So thats why I appreciate that getting somewhere in this game takes time. (its something I felt was lacking from the previous space run title, in fact)

For folks having issues with ship design and level advancement, efficiency with module placement as well as with use of connectors and upgraders is the trick. Additionally, some modules have hidden advantages, try them all. Improving ship layout can be just as effective as unlocking new items... Still having a tough time with some routes and wanting a ship design spoiler? Research some more efficient designs from the multiplayer content. Hint: Set a transport contract for a similar route and when it is fulfilled, look at your message logs for contracts fulfilled by other same-level players if you decide you want a bit of a spoiler.

Finally I just wanted to address a concern that I'd read which was that folks found the in-game economy to be less than rewarding. This is true if you dont take advantage of the multiplayer content. The non-player economy is unrewarding to encourage multiplayer interaction, which is much more rewarding... Not feeling effective enough at moving cargo? Other players with plenty of cargo space will appreciate being able to move large volumes of your cargo. Invest in useless stuff, have someone move it to where its useful, sell for acceptable markup.

Frankly, the amount of quality and detail as well as depth and replayability that this title offers shouldnt be overlooked. If you like Tower Defense or Casual-RPG space games, dont pass up this title. It is absolutely worth it.

Really awesom game, but gets grindy from time to time. Gameplay is fairly balanced but still challenging. If you like creative tower defenses and the space theme, get it!

Great game. Fun extension of the orginal. Too much grind for parts. Crashes in the middle/end of runs loosing all progress from a 'connection error to server' even in 'offline mode', essentially making it unplayable as you loose all your progress.

Space Run Galaxy is a challenging, relatively reflex-dependent variant on the tower defence genre. The game makes many improvements on the original, including more intricate and involving complementarities between "towers," some multiplayer interaction, the ability to design one's own ships, and partial randomization of enemies. The graphics remain colorful and pleasing. SRG is suitable for a quick ten minute run over your lunch break, or to play for extended sessions while accomplishing metagoals.

Unlike many tower defence competitors but like the original, SRG controversially cannot be paused, and at times the game will throw enough at you simultaneously that you must place pieces or use special abilities without careful forethought. I would prefer a pause option, but the at times rapid pace never quite feels twitchy, and does make for some tense gameplay.

The sequel plays somewhat less like a puzzle game than the original. In the original enemies in a given run were always identical and attacked in identical patterns, so difficult levels had to be overcome by learning how to design your a ship in the correct order to counter attacks you learned in previous attempts were coming. The sequel partially randomizes attacks. For example, on a given run, the first wave may always be asteroids, but the asteroids could appear from one of several directions. The upshot is that your ship designs must be robust to unknown attacks. I find this style of gameplay more satisfying than the original.

There are questionable design decisions. There is some sort of irrelevant and dull overarching plot told via relentless dialogues between missions, yet I can't imagine anyone not just clicking through each of these dialogues. The multiplayer aspect consists of being able to trade resources with other players and take contracts to run resources from one planet to another for other players, but very little is added to the game by these interactions, and since each planet has its own market for resources each market is very thin, non-existent in the late game planets because there are so few players. Finally, the end game is disappointing, as when you finally buy access to sufficient numbers of towers on sufficiently large ships, you'll just wind up building the same successful design over and over.

Overall, SRG is an excellent addition to the tower defence genre, highly recommended.

Hell yeah! So glad to have a bigger, badder version of Space Run!

The gameplay can be frustrating at times, and a couple times the servers crashed while I was playing, but overall the brilliance in the game design and mechanics really shows through. Whoever made this is a genius.

After 10 hours of playing this, I went back and played the first one. The first one had rhythm. It's easier to have rhythm when gameplay is fairly linear, and here in the sequel with less linear gameplay, it's tougher to have a good rhythm. When you see people complaining about the grind in the sequel, it's because the rhythm hasn't quite been tweaked.

I like the idea of running cargo all over to get upgrades from different places. I like the idea of having to buy modules and weapons to be able to add them to my ship rather than just having unlimited stuff to add. I like the idea of being able to run different missions in a web all over the system, and I like the idea of getting different colors and levels of resources. I like the idea of buying different ships. But these aren't put together in a good way. It's too unfocused, and sometimes it's hard even to grind out more resources. I could run missions and get random resource colors that are totally useless, causing me to run more missions to get the resources in the right place to actually buy upgrades. You can sell off unneeded resources to buy the ones you need, but the exchange rate is absolutely terrible (and not even available at every station, which is another poor design choice). I'm at a point now where I'm sometimes too weak to do the missions that get me experience, but I need experience to reach a level to be able to buy the upgrades I need to do some of these missions.

Odd design choices too. For example: the most simple blaster, the base weapon in the game, can't be re-oriented unlike in the first game. But the enemies come from random directions, so you also can't plan on which way your weapons should really point. That's a tough design decision, because the nature of the gun requires careful planning, but the nature of the mission defies careful planning. I don't necessarily think it's a bad design decision to make enemies show up from random directions, but paired with the set blaster orientation it makes things a bit too random. Nobody wants to win or lose solely on the roll of the RNG.

It's also tough because your components you build your ship with are tough to repair, unlike in the original when it only cost hex nuts. This makes repair units and shield units mandatory, but between these, the needs for weapons sticking out in all six directions, and the constant need for more speed, I end up being extremely starved for resources.

All in all, this is kind of a frustrating experience. I loved the first game but it lacked replayability. But I feel like I've gotten nowhere here in the sequel and it's too frustrating and grindy to really continue. I feel like it's just not balanced quite right, and I'm not sure it's worth buying.