A review copy was provided by the developer.

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Space Raiders in Space (SR) was a game I deliberated picking up for a while because I didn't know what to think of the gameplay. Seeing multiple characters on screen, looting and erecting barriers, while shooting at giant insects, made me think juggling everything would be a pain. However, after checking out some videos on it, I was more interested in trying it.


There are three game modes in SR: Story, Endless, and Survival. Story has you follow the main plot line for what's taking place, unlocking new equipment after each chapter. Your crew handles matters by exploring their environment for important resources, which you turn into defensive barriers. Thankfully there's a few weapons left behind as well, since weapons degrade with use. Of note, the materials you have as you finish a chapter carries over to the next one, so even if you do manage to narrowly scrape by and survive, you might screw yourself for the next round.

This principle also applies in Endless and Survival Mode. Endless Mode emphasizes getting a high score, as you travel from one location to the next. The objective is to balance gathering enough resources, particularly food, to survive the trip to the next location. However, staying in one place makes the waves of insects stronger. Survival removes any idea of moving somewhere else, as you stay in place and see how long you're able to last. With enemy forces gaining strength every wave, and nowhere else to go, it's only a matter of time until you meet a grisly fate.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2511612452
The game can be played with a controller, but with how it functions as a strategy game, I found it easier just to follow the tutorial and use the mouse and keyboard. There are shortcut keys available to bring up some of the menus, but I relied on the mouse to bring them up myself. Otherwise, the mouse is used for interacting with all of the items in the game. It functions well enough, though the UI feels a bit cluttered or clumsy at times.


Human beings are exploring the cosmos, a few astronauts make contact with a hive mind alien race, and it actually leads to peaceful coexistence. However, they suddenly turn hostile, and the astronauts desperately try to reconnect with humanity. Story elements unfold both in the gameplay and in-between chapters. The tone of the story is largely sober, as far as the events taking place, but the writing, character interactions, and voiceovers don't take it very seriously. It's an odd blend, but it kind of works.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2511612303
Not only does SR make use of a comic book style in its visuals, it's also heavy-handed with darkness. Such a thing is typically done to reinforce a moody or serious tone, making everything seem gritty, but the effect here is that the colors contrast strongly against so much black background. SR also lampoons the potentially dour tone by interspersing goofy dialogue and commentary from the narrator. Either way, I like this approach to the aesthetic. This coloring and style aren't something I see in games often, and I'm a sucker for blue and purple.


With a soundtrack not nearly as striking as the graphics, the music in SR sounds like eerie ambient noise, as if what you're experiencing is really suspenseful or unnerving. It's tone doesn't quite fit with how the game plays, even if it does have a sci-fi vibe to it. The sound effects are fitting for the game, but could be balanced better with the music. I think most people would like the voice acting, although Jimmy's voice can get a bit old with his bruh stereotype.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2511612622
🌟 Being able to set up your own barriers allows for creativity in determining the best line of defense, as there are ways to manipulate the AI. For instance, enemies are pretty single-minded in finding the shortest route, while also prioritizing defensive points. If you place turrets out of their pathways, they'll still be shot at, but typically won't bother destroying the turret.
🌟 Unlike many games dealing with monstrous aliens, in theory the ones in the game had no issues intermingling with humans. That is, until the fire nation attacked.
🌟 Although the comic book style has been implemented before, SR still has its own unique flair and attitude. It's not quite like anything else I've played.


❌ Even though the game revolves around micromanaging each character, your ability to control their actions is limited. Setting all raiders to defend won't necessarily lead to all of them taking enough shelter to prevent being attacked, since they act like they're social distancing or something. If they're too deep in defenses and you set them to attack, they'll advance beyond your walls to fire on enemies. Not being able to position them directly is a limitation.
❌ Like tower defense games, you can have a very successful run until the last wave, and make a mistake that gets one of your characters killed, wasting all of the time you just spent playing through the chapter. You can save and quit from any mode at any time, and return where you left off, but dying won't reload that save. It's deleted instead.
❌ Figuring out how the map is intended to face and where you're theoretically supposed to build up your defenses is at times unclear. The UI for building new items can also be hard to make out.


🔍 It's a good idea to have at least a few layers of walls, so you have an emergency barrier to hunker in if necessary. Turrets and caltrops aren't expensive but increase your DPS, so generously scatter them around. When you get the ability to build a defense point, replace portions of your outer walls with them. These protect your allies against AOE attacks, which walls won't do, and when in defense mode, they'll hunker down in the defense point much closer to the enemies than otherwise.
🔍 After killing the last enemy in a wave, turn on planning mode and select items you want repaired or built. Then at the start of the cool down phase, manually select your best characters for building to work on those projects as the others search. Searching doesn't take a long time, but if you have everyone take long walks to get to the search points, you won't have enough time to both search and build.


I was a bit perplexed by what the devs expected me to do within a few of the early chapters, as the defenses I were setting up didn't cut the mustard. However, after getting past those initial humps, I got a better grasp of how to approach the game and manage the few variables it presents. After getting more comfortable with SR, I enjoyed my time with it, although it wasn't without some flaws. Handling all of the characters could be made more clean and simplistic, but micromanaging tends to clutter things up no matter the approach. Unless you get really sucked into Endless or Survival Mode, the game would last you about 12 or so hours, so I'd recommend picking it up on sale.

Space Raiders in Space is a tower defense and squad management game. It's strategic, addictive, funny, and full of content.

Your squad of up to 8 soldiers has to build defenses such as wood barricades, turrets, traps, and more to survive several waves of bugs. Each soldier can carry two weapons (one gun and one for close-combat). There are three resources which you will need to gather. Between waves, you can tell your soldiers to search for them. With these resources, you can build new defenses. Food is used to heal your soldiers.

Another important thing to survive is squad management. You need to give orders all the time. Between waves, you need to tell them to search, build, repair or swap weapons. Weapons will break after some time using them. When bugs attack, you can tell your soldiers to go into defend-, attack- or coward-mode. All of them have it's pros and cons.

It's also very important to constantly check your defenses. They will break after they took enough damage. You can repair them for a small price which is cheaper than building them again.

The story mode is around 6 hours long. The story is told through pages of a comic book and voice lines. The voice acting is good enough, especially for such a small indie game. The story is pretty generic but stands out thanks to its humor. The characters, dialogues, and even in-game menus such as tutorials and infoboxes are funny as hell. I can't describe it in any other way. I was laughing out loud several times.

For example, there was a situation where someone from your crew said something. The others were thought I may be a quote from a movie. You had to decide if it was a coincidence or not. If you say "Nah, it was just a coincidence", the one saying it will get sulky and leaves your crew. It's certainly not everyone's humor but if you're into it, you'll love it.
Sometimes it's straight out rough and other times it's very dark.

Besides the story mode, there is a roguelike mode which even has a small story. There are different scenarios to play, each with different maps, a different story, and different crew members who all have a personality and voice lines. You start out pretty basic and your goal is to survive as long as possible and unlock new things.
Every scenario is also playable in an endless survival mode. In both modes, you'll get a high score. There is a leaderboard to measure yourself with others.

Like every game, SPiS isn't perfect. It could use some more variations of enemies (especially bosses) and a few more guns. Dead enemies disappear after a few seconds but there are so many of them, that you sometimes can't see anything. This will force you to look at the UI of characters to see if they take damage, etc.
On some maps, you can't have a nice overview. Walls cover some parts of your defenses or characters and you need to constantly move the camera.
If you're late into a run, the map is clustered with defenses and you won't be able to click on some small things. This will make it impossible to repair them if you don't want to repair everything (There's a button for that).
All of these things are just minor. They won't really negatively affect gameplay that much but it shows that there is something to improve.

I played many TD games before. Like almost all games in the genre, it's easy to learn. Some of them are hard to master and SRiS is certainly one of them. It get's really addictive. Most generic TD games reach the "it's more of the same, not really fun, just doing the same over and over"-state after around two hours. Don't get me wrong, they can be fun here and there but not so in the long run. SPiS is different. If you think you'll reach that state, the game will spice things up with new things to discover. And thanks to squad management it's quite unique in general.

This definitely is a game that deserves more love, praise, and recognition
overall. These two Devs made it with much love and it shows. Not just that, it's REALLY a great game and you won't regret buying it if you're into tower defense games. It's a gem in the genre!

Where to start....The devs are awesome, first off. Secondly, everything else is awesome. Great humor, great artwork, the game runs as smooth as.....something incredibly smooth. lmao, seriously, very well optimized and its early access! If you join the Discord, the devs will actually talk to you, never had that experience before. Anyway, support these two awesome devs (not stupid) and buy this game!

Edit - This game just got a whole lot more epic with the story update! Edit, edit - just buy the game!

They call themselves 2 Stupid Devs, but really only one of them is stupid. The other one is completely moronic and worthless and all around terrible. But despite Nick's plentiful and obvious shortcomings as a human being, they've still managed to put together a fun game.

Awesome comic book visuals, lots of cool weapons, interesting decisions to be made, fairly intense combat against gross looking bugs, and occasionally frustrating RNG results. The devs are very responsive to community feedback, especially if the feedback is delivered via insults or poorly drawn memes.

But yeah, fun game, give it a shot!

Art good, writing good, good humor, and pretty fun game. 7/10 I think the $9.99 price point is perfectly priced as well. Mix of we are billions + cod zombies.

+ Art is very good
+ Writing is funny and enjoyable to read
+ To quote the dev's "Simplicty with Depth"
+ Fun for people who like the genre and people new to the genre
+ Leaderboards add to replayability

- Still in Early Access
- Some game modes not available

- Menus can be a bit confusing
- Equipping items is weird at first
- Can see the game getting pretty repetitive at higher amount of hours played

7/10

It's actually more of a "meh - not bad" from me than a straight up recommendation.
So far, I've finished the story on normal difficulty and played a bit of the RNG-Endless-mode.

The Good:

This is a nice twist on tower-defence. Characters with guns and blades and a few towers and mostly walls to maze with, to make the bugs go longer ways around you.
The music is nice, the atmosphere fits with what they're going for.
Bug-Killing is fun. Especially with the different ranged weapons.
The main story was quick, not too stupid and actually kinda nice.

The Meh:

Not too much variation on regular enemy types. The only things in the story mode that shake things up a bit are ranged bugs which usually appear quite late (and easy to mess with by mazing) and armored bugs which take AP-weapons and are just plain harder to kill (again solved by mazing and making them take longer routes).
Bosses. Once you know each bosses' gimmick, they aren't too much of a pain to deal with. By the end of the storyline it gets kind of boring to fight the same bosses again and again.
Camera controls: I found out by accident that I could actually control the camera, since it was never mentioned in the tutorial. It's not really necessary, but a few missions can get confusing if you stick to just panning and not turning the camera.
Melee-combat: Considering how important the health of your toons is and how expensive it is to heal them, I rarely found any use for melee combat outside of using it against certain bosses. Especially since there is no way of mitigating damage, like armor for your toons.

The Bad:

The supposed "humor" was totally not my thing. Wayyy over the top. They try to make it look like they are being cringe-inducing edgy on purpose to poke fun at that as well, but then it just gets too meta and ironic. Too much "nudge-nudge wink-wink, aren't we funny?" going on for my taste. And it tries to come across as doing "adult themes" but the way they are handled feels pretty juvenile. If you don't mind that, it's probably a positive for you. I might have to try to turn off the profanity, as there is that option in the game.
Endless mode exacerbates that for me. Because it recycles the same jokes after a while which makes them even more annoying.

Conclusion:

Because of its price and the fun I had it is a solid "recommend" from me, but beware the things I said. Don't go expecting to sink hundreds of hours into this one.

An excellent game all-around. The combat is fairly straightforward. but the mechanics and micro/macro-management can get incredibly complex. It's has a very low skill floor where my six-year-old son could play. The skill ceiling, however, can get quite high. There's a lot of weapon swapping and action management that can allow for some very advanced kiting mechanics.

Considering how many ♥♥♥♥ games launched this year, this game is definitely near the top. It's a shame that AAA games are much worse than Indie games nowadays.

Please do yourself a favor and give this game a chance. For the price, you cannot pass it up.

Captain Anatolian's Small Rewievs

The game consists of tower defense, survival and strategy genres.
The gameplay repeats for a while, but the game does not take long.
It has stylistic and comic style graphics.
The storytelling is nice and funny. There are jokes that destroy the 3rd wall.
The game has 3 different endings. If you want to see 3 ends, you have to play the last episode 3 times.
The game ends after 5.5 hours.It takes 7 hours if you want to see all the ends.

Video link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Oha-VdyqYI&t=347s

2 stupid devs made 1 stupid game.

This is a very solid tower defense game. The story mode is pretty cool and the whole game goes for a comic book vibe that I think is executed very well.

While the story mode is cool, the meat and potatoes are definitely in the Endless and Survival modes. I really like that there are several different character starts that you can choose from. Squad management is a core part of the game and managing your squads abilities can make or break you on the harder waves. This definitely keeps the replayability up, especially when you're learning the game and might need to try out different strategies. One of the best things that I like about this game is that it allows you to see the pathing for each wave and construct defenses that will reroute that pathing. This is very cool in survival mode as it allows you to build very complex mazes to defend yourself with. I think that there is a lot of potential in this game for different strategies and I know that I'm going to take the time to explore them.

Overall the graphics in this game are really solid. They've done a good job of implementing comic book graphics. The different guns and melee weapons that you can get and they look very cool and unique. The voice cast did a good job in the story mode and the dialog is pretty funny at times.

If you are a fan of the tower defense genre, I'd definitely recommend giving this game a shot.