Space Run Galaxy Review

Space Run Galaxy is an interesting take on the Tower Defense genre by Passtech Studios.

In this game you are the captain of your ship. Not only that, you are a runner. A space runner actually. You come into the employ of Buck Mann, who has built up his own courier service over the past 20 years. It is your job to ferry cargo from planet to planet for various shall we say… “eccentric” characters and leaders of various corporations.

Now the general idea of the game may sound simple at first, take this box over to there safely. However, it’s never that simple is it? Your ship only has so much space, the more cargo you take with you, the less ‘shooty shooty, bang bangs’ you can put down. That’s pretty much the game, it also includes some cool features such as online interaction. Selling to other players, sending/receiving cargo missions and so on so forth. Kind of like how you might find in an MMO.

In Space Galaxy Run you may find yourself employing a different strategy than with most tower defense titles. Your ship has a certain number of tiles (which you can expand) to place towers on. You are also limited to a certain number of each tower (also expandable) that you can place during a run. This means for more challenging gameplay than you may find from a tower defense game which I find to be a breath of fresh air. No longer can you save up all your cash and then slap down a billion towers into a concentrated area, effectively creating a wall of impenetrable death the likes of which Trump nor Hadrian could scarce dream about. Now you must think tactically. Playing the game I found myself often thinking “If I place this tower here to support my other tower, I’ll have run out of laser turrets and if I get attacked in the rear I’ll have no defenses.” Off the fly decisions like this considering the what if and not just the what is, is what makes this game so unique to it’s genre. This may sound a small detail, but I feel the need to point it out, you can customise the colour of the tiles on the ship. Yes, I know that sounds incredibly superficial, but I found it extremely useful for organizing my ship! I quickly realised I can use a colour scheme to dedicate certain tiles to weapons, certain tiles to support and certain tiles to defense, just one less thing you need to think about during a firefight. On another note, I particularly enjoyed the witty humour, it really breaks up gameplay with a bit of banter here and there. I am especially fond of Buck’s constant abuse of Adamm – 12 and the constant use of the word space as an adjective. Space Runner, Space Merchants Guild, Space Port… Reminds me of that line from Rick and Morty “Quantum carborator? Jeez Morty, you can’t just add a sci-fi word to a car word and hope it means something.”

Graphically, the game looks pretty good. The dialogue scenes are well drawn, the asteroids look pretty nifty and the laser/plasma effects look more than decent. I think the overall art style is a nice compliment to the humour of the game, detailing the characters to add that extra bit of personality for them. As for sound effects well, I haven’t much of anything bad to say there. With a fully voice acted cast including the talent of Liam O Brien himself, the soundtrack too is an excellent listen for those of you who like wind instrument heavy space orchestras (I know I do now).

At the end of the day, this is a good game. A very good game. If you want to lose 3 hours or maybe just burn 20 minutes, there are certainly worse games for you to spend your money on. I mean of course you should only get it if you like Tower Defense, this ain’t no run and gun shoot em up. Definitely worth buying on which note, at the time of writing it’s on sale.

Overall, I give this game an 8/10. Judging it purely as what it is, a Tower Defense from an Indie dev this is a good game and a solid purchase. There is no fault with anything in the game, it’s only drawback would be what it doesn’t have. Yet. Granted more resources to work with and maybe a bigger team I have no doubt in my mind Passtech could do great things and make its way further up the scoreboard. I shall be keeping an eye on this franchise in the future, but for now I have some runs to do.