Space Crew Demo First Impressions

Here’s a hypothetical question for us to ponder together, folks: what would you get if you crossed Subset Games’ 2012 title FTL: Faster Than Light with Curve Digital and Runner Duck’s 2017 joint venture, Bomber Crew? Well, thankfully, we no longer have to wonder or speculate about that, and it’s my pleasure to tell you exactly why that is. You see, Bomber Crew is slated to receive a sequel sometime this September entitled Space Crew.

This new title from the aforementioned duo of Runner Duck and Curve Digital seems to me like a fitting sequel to the original. However, I admit I may very well be biased on account of how much I enjoy both Bomber Crew and FTL. Much to my delight, a demo of Space Crew was made available on Steam at the beginning of the “Summer Edition” of the Steam Games Festival a few weeks back. Additionally, it remains available for download as far as I can tell at the time of writing.

This demo was (admittedly) released alongside about nine hundred other demos of various games from legions of different developers and publishers during the event. Yet I’m ecstatic that Space Crew‘s demo still managed to catch my eye thanks to a tip from one of my esteemed colleagues here at Phenixx Gaming. If you’ll indulge me, dear reader, I’d like to spend a while discussing my first impressions of the demo version of Space Crew.

It is best to begin by establishing a sort of baseline foundation of the mechanics from both FTL and Bomber Crew that mesh with one another to form Space Crew. Let’s briefly go over a few gameplay mechanics from the original games in order to help those of you that haven’t played either of them more clearly understand their mechanics. Let’s go into what’s new, what isn’t, and what has been improved upon in Space Crew.

In Bomber Crew, your ultimate goal is to play a pivotal role in helping Britain’s Royal Air Force – or the United States Air Force, if you own a certain bit of DLC – win World War II through skillful piloting and the elimination of key targets which belong to the Axis powers. You go about this by commanding a crew aboard a bomber as they carry out their various missions.

For instance, you’ll need your navigator to give your pilot frequently-updated headings to ensure you can reach your destination, complete your objective, and safely return to base before your bomber runs out of fuel. This is done by entering “tagging mode” by pressing your middle mouse button or space bar. Upon entering this mode, you must simply center the camera on whatever you want to tag for a couple of seconds, whether it’s a navigation heading, your assigned target, or an enemy fighter pilot.

Additionally, a particularly essential member of your crew is the engineer, who can repair broken or damaged systems aboard your bomber more quickly than anyone else at your command. You’ll need to make use of their skills quite often, as components of your aircraft such as your electrical or hydraulic systems might even break down just after takeoff. However, you can upgrade them to make them more reliable.

You’ll need to make absolutely sure that you tag any enemies in your immediate vicinity in a timely manner. If you don’t, your gunners won’t know to open fire upon them, which means you’re essentially a sitting duck until you order your gunners to fight back. Additionally, missions within Bomber Crew can periodically have their difficulty and risks to the safety of your crew members increased due to the presence of so-called enemy “ace pilots.” These aces want nothing more than to shoot you down for having the audacity to enter their airspace.

You can usually outrun ace pilots if you don’t have the desire or fuel to engage them, but they’ll remain a thorn in your side on various missions until you take them down. In my experience, it’s wisest to leave enemy ace pilots alone as much as possible until you’ve upgraded your bomber with enough armor and firepower to give you a better chance of emerging victorious.

Let’s switch gears for a moment so that I may briefly discuss how FTL: Faster Than Light factors into this equation. Within the context of FTL, you control the crew of the last remaining spacecraft in the employ of the Federation, a presumably-governmental entity which entrusts you with carrying vital data to a destination that will likely seem to be impossibly far away for your first several procedurally-generated attempts.

Matters most assuredly aren’t helped at all by the fact that you’re doggedly pursued during this effort by an entire fleet of rebel ships who seek to destroy you and prevent you from getting that data to its destination. A major difference in gameplay between FTL and Bomber Crew is that within the former, nothing except combat happens in real-time. Even then, you can technically force the combat to become turn-based by making strategic use of the pause button.

Instead, you need simply to use your ship’s titular FTL drive to jump from beacon to beacon within sectors of various galaxies until you eventually reach your objective. You can charge your FTL drive while in combat in order to escape from a fight that isn’t going your way, although this takes quite a while and can only be done if you’ve got someone actively operating both the helm of the ship and the engine control systems.

Just having someone to control the helm and the engines can be a tall order if you’ve lost too many crew members, considering you’ll also preferably want someone controlling your ship’s weapons and shields. You can only use your FTL drive ( in combat or otherwise) if you have enough fuel to do so. Each jump consumes one unit of fuel; fuel can, in turn, be replenished by purchasing it with scrap metal you acquire from combat at various shops and trading outposts you’ll encounter on your journey.

My final important note about FTL‘s gameplay in this context is that each system aboard your ship requires power to function. Your engines, weapons, shields, medical bay, oxygen generator, door control systems, and onboard sensors will all be rendered useless if your ship lacks the ability to power them all. This is true at least until you upgrade your ship and increase the amount of power it can send to each of these systems at once. However, this limitation can actually work to your advantage in certain situations if you know what you’re doing.

You see, if your ship is funneling power to a system you aren’t currently using such as your medical bay, for example; you can divert that power away from the unnecessary system and instead redirect it to something else such as your weapons or shields. This will allow them to function more efficiently during a fight. You’ll still need a crew member stationed at the controls of your weapons and shields to make them recharge more quickly. However, having more power diverted to weapons systems can allow you to pack a larger punch when you need it, depending on your ship’s current armaments.

Having said all that, I think we can finally turn our attention back to Space Crew. As I alluded to earlier, Space Crew features many gameplay mechanics from both of the other titles in question in order to establish its own gameplay. For the most part, I think the game goes about that quite well. To be brutally honest with you, dear reader, I suspect you might think Space Crew is little more than Bomber Crew with a different coat of paint when you first lay eyes upon what this new title has to offer.

In quite a few ways, I would say you’d be right about that. Much of Space Crew’s art style is virtually identical to that of Bomber Crew, and you might reasonably suspect that the biggest difference between the two is that Space Crew is set, well, in space. The gameplay of this new title is also quite similar to that of both games about which I’ve droned on thus far, albeit with a generous handful of welcome changes and additions that I think allow Space Crew to stand largely on its own merits.

Firstly, in Bomber Crew, you’ll have to periodically order your gunners to temporarily leave their turrets and retrieve a fresh supply of ammunition from a box present aboard your bomber. That remains the case until you progress far enough through the game’s campaign to reach the point at which you can unlock and install upgraded turrets with automatic ammo feeds attached to them. Even then, though, you’d best hope you can avoid having any bombers equipped with these upgrades destroyed; installing them in a new aircraft isn’t exactly inexpensive.

Conversely, within Space Crew, all gun turrets aboard your initial ship are energy weapons. Mercifully, this means you won’t have to manually instruct any of your gunners to replenish their ammunition at any point. It also means that you won’t lose any degree of firepower for any length of time due to your gunners having to momentarily abandon their stations to grab and install a couple more ammo belts. This absence of a decline in firing rate could mean the difference between victory and defeat in a firefight. This is especially true when you’re trying to take down particularly elusive enemies.

Additionally, your ships in both FTL and Bomber Crew contain medical bays for your crew members to use to restore their health if they sustain any injuries. Depending on the size of your ship in FTL, your medical bay might be able to simultaneously accommodate and heal your entire crew. In Bomber Crew, for comparison, only one member of your squad can use the medical bay at a time during a mission.

The latter of these scenarios remains the case in Space Crew, albeit with something of a twist. Space Crew‘s medical bay has limited healing capacity and as far as I can tell, cannot be rendered operational again if its battery is fully depleted during a mission. This provides an incentive to be more conservative in terms of healing your squad members unnecessarily. It also gives you more of a reason to avoid anyone at your command being damaged by enemy fire or crises that break out aboard your ship.

After all, you never know when your medical bay’s battery could run dry at an absolutely critical moment. Honestly, the limited capacity of Space Crew‘s medical bay makes more sense to me than the system present in Bomber Crew does. Since you’re on a high-tech space-faring vessel in the former game, it seems more logical to me that your medical technology would have some limiting factor as opposed to your crew members in Bomber Crew simply having a bit of a nap when they use the onboard medical bay.

Bomber Crew’s aforementioned dastardly “ace pilots” make a return in Space Crew, although they do so in the form of enemy champions. Champions are alien life forms of various types that hail from different parts of deep space. Based on my encounter with the first of these enemy champions within the Space Crew demo, I would provide the same advice I did earlier; outrun them as best you can until you’re able to upgrade your ship and even the odds.

You might find heeding that advice to be particularly difficult within Space Crew, however. This is due to a couple of the aforementioned mechanics within FTL that come into play. You see, to navigate in Space Crew you have to enter tagging mode and lock onto an objective, such as “jump gates.” Once you get close enough to one of these jump gates, you can charge your ship’s “hyperdrive” to get through the gate and wind up on the other side, wherever that may be.

The drawback to doing this (especially at first,) is that your engines need so much power to jump through these gates that all your other onboard systems such as weapons, shields, oxygen and gravity generators, etc. are temporarily rendered inoperable until you complete your jump. This typically isn’t a problem when you aren’t in combat. Fully charging your hyperdrive and successfully jumping when there are no enemies around only takes a couple of seconds. However, when you are in combat, the charging process can take up to a full minute to complete.

As I said, the process of gearing up to jump to a new destination renders your weapons and shields powerless until you upgrade your ship’s power output capacity significantly. Obviously, having useless weapons won’t do you much good when you’re swarmed by enemy fighters. On top of that, your starting ship likely won’t survive without shields long enough to allow you to jump to safety while hostiles are still in your vicinity. This means you’ll have to orbit your current objective until you’ve eliminated every nearby enemy, which can take quite a while. I think this is a fairly minor gripe, but it’s one that I still consider noteworthy.

The main new attraction present in the demo version of Space Crew is the tractor beam. You can use this to both reel in and jettison nearby objects, as well as retrieve any crew members who have exited your ship. You’ll typically have your crew’s engineer operate this system, at least during the one time you’re able to use the tractor beam in the demo’s first mission.

For example, your first mission in the demo tasks you with using your ship’s tractor beam to pull a malfunctioning communication array aboard your ship. Your engineer will then repair this array and subsequently use the tractor beam again to put it back where it needs to be outside your ship. As I mentioned, this is the only time I experienced the tractor beam system throughout my time with Space Crew’s demo. I think it’s definitely an exciting concept, although I’ll have to experiment with it more once the full game is out.

I’m most assuredly looking forward to the release of the full version of Space Crew. I sincerely hope everything goes to plan for Curve Digital and Runner Duck so that they can get the game out on their announced schedule in September. Regardless of when the game ultimately releases, you have my word that I’ll cover Space Crew in a more detailed fashion here on Phenixx Gaming once I’ve gotten my hands on it.