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User Score
9.1

Presentation - 9.5
Gameplay - 9.5
Value - 8.5

When I saw Affordable Space Adventures in the Nintendo friends Humble Bundle, I knew I wanted to invest in it just for this game. From the moment I originally saw it, I was impressed with what the team was trying to do. With such high expectation, ASA really surprised me with how great of a game it is!

The general story behind Affordable Space Adventure is Uexplore has come out with a new cheap spaceship that can take anyone into outer space to explore uncivilized worlds. And this is exactly what you decide to do. I must admit it’s not a very story driven game… But they hide this fact by doing several cut scenes with a representative from company talking how safe the ships are, among others. The voicing acting of them are top notch and I surprisingly found them very entertaining. They run great with the unspoken joke of the game, that your ship isn't very great.

Enough with the story, onto the gameplay, which everything in the game revolves around you and your gamepad. The gamepad is your control panel for the ship. The gamepad screen features things such as the type of engine to use, how much thrust to use, how much stabilizer to use. Take a look at the picture below to get a bit of visualization of what the gamepad features.

Each one of these panels plays a huge part in solving a puzzle. Since as you fly around the planet, you find a variety of enemies that you must fly around (there is no killing them). Each enemy has some sort of trait that will trigger them to attack you. Such as some are very sensitive to electricity, so you’re going to  switch the gas engine on and turn off things such as lights to get the electricity as low as possible. And the gauges at the top will tell you if you’re within range of electricity for the monster not to attack. Another example would be an enemy is sensitive to noise, so you’re going to want to switch to electric engine, and turn down your thrust and such to make your ship as quite as possible.

All these elements play great together to make a fun gameplay experience, since you scan in every enemy with your laser, you’ll always know what they like and don’t like. So there will never be much confusion on what to do. But trying to find the perfect mix of gauges on the other hand is a bit difficult and there is a lot of trial and error.

Luckily Affordable Space Adventure also assorts some of the gamepad features to your face buttons. So switching from electric to gas is one button press away, along with switching between the 3 landing gears. So it puts a bit of a burden off of you from needing to look down on some of the things that require quick changes.

With these gameplay features, you of course need nifty level design to go along with it and Affordable Space Adventure certainly does deliver. A lot of levels like to use the concept of introducing you slowly to new concepts. Such as a laser, they first showed it to you with switching on and off. Then they move you to 2 that are off timed with each other. So they do a great job of introducing the new elements they are adding to the world. Since after that, they throw some damn hard laser based puzzles at you. These environmental elements also make you adjust your control panel, you might have a really warm area that needs you to produce a lot of heat. You might need to fall very fast so you turn your engines off. You might want have a super precise movement forward to avoid a laser, so you turn up your stabilizer. There is just is much to consider as you go through the varied elements of each level and what to change on your gamepad.

The level designs also do a pretty good job of keeping a good mixture of new and different elements. Since it would be boring if every area you went into is a narrow pathway. So they mix things up with wide open areas, a long with some areas where there’s branching pathways that you must follow each to open a door. Of course, while navigating through enemies and puzzle elements.

One thing I do like that this game did is that it’s not set up in levels. You don’t go from a starting point to an end point, then onto a world map. The world is truly one connected piece and you’re slowly moving through it. It was refreshing that they took the game in this way, it helps build a narrative of what this planet is like and present a living and breathing experience. And they never break the terrific atmosphere the game creates due to this.

And another genius progression element the game does is constantly adding new things to your control panel (gamepad). You don’t just start out with all the elements as usable. You get them one by one as you go along. So it does a wonderful job of keeping the game fresh. This whole concept kept me on my heals since I need to quickly adapt to the new ability they added to my ship. Since you knew the next area you went to is gonna put your skills to the test.

Graphics wise, lighting and shadows contrast works wonderfully with the worlds. And the foggy look of the game helps set the mood of the game. While the graphics aren’t ground breaking, they give a great style to the game and create a wonderful atmosphere.

One thing I will say about the last few missions of the game is that I thought they were perfect, the feeling that they give is perfect. The way they set it up and it’s executed was genius. That’s as far as I’ll go without spoilers. You'll see what this vague statement is referring to if you play the game.

Sadly the wonderful atmosphere, progression system, game-play, and ending couldn’t stop this game from having issues and one of the biggest is all the long loading screens. At times it felt like 5 to 10 minutes of gameplay, and then you had to sit through a 30 second loading screen again and again. This would really ruins the atmosphere at times. It was a shame they weren’t able to optimize the game a bit more to try and shorten these. Another issue is the lack of any real replay ability. There really isn’t any reason to play this game again unless you want to try and finish it a bit faster. Other than that, there’s not really any point.

+

Great art style and atmosphere
Unique gamepad usage
Unique/fun gameplay
Thought provoking puzzles
Great level design
Voice acting / cut scenes

-

Lots of long loading screens
No replay value