Space Pirates And Zombies Demo Impressions

I've been watching ArchmageMelek's Let's Play of SPAZ and just last night got around to playing the demo on Steam.

Rather than providing some long-winded explanation of the game, I'm just going to list what I did and didn't like.

The Good:

• Graphics - everything looks beautiful.  As far as graphical functionality goes, everything that needs to stand out so that you'll notice it stands out so that you'll notice it.
• Idle radio chatter - absolutely hilarious, and a nice touch on an already good game.  "In space, nobody can hear you scream, unless you're chatting on the right frequency."
• Gameplay - relatively straightforward.  Make ships, fly around, shoot stuff, try not to die.  Make friends with people and they won't attack you, but if you piss them off, they'll start attacking you again.  It works pretty well.
• Narration - story narrated by TotalBiscuit.
• Variety - The galaxy you play in is randomly generated when you start, and you have options.  Once you're playing, you have options for how you want to outfit your ships.  As you progress you'll get more and more ship parts, and the ability to research them to make them better.  Choose a setup that works well for you.

The Bad:

• Controls - It uses WASD for ship movement, which is fine, but it's relative to the direction your ship is facing.  I keep trying to use the movement controls as if they work more like the movement stick in a twin-stick shooter, that is, W would make me go to the top of the screen, D to the right, S to the bottom, and A to the left.  Instead, W is forward, and you head towards the mouse pointer.  Also, this might just be a demo thing, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to drop off goons at my warp beacon.  They just kind of stay on my ship until I jump somewhere else.

The Overall:

• Well, normally when one thinks of a phrase beginning with "the good, the bad", it ends with "the ugly".  Fortunately, here there is no ugly.  The game is good overall.  I have issues with its controls, but they only sometimes affect me and I was able to play for a few hours and get a fair amount of action out of the two solar systems you're limited to in the demo.  There are many more ways you could use your money, but this is one of the better ones.