About Starscape

If you like arcade shooters and don't mind spending half of your time mining asteroids for minerals, you might actually like this. However, arcade shooter fans will be more at home with this than most others as the game starts to get quite hectic towards the end. Maintaining mineral reserves, protecting the mobile spacestation, and repairing your ship and the station even during the fights will get quite common tasks. Asteroid mining is more required by research and development of new ships and ship hardware than for repairs as some of the larger enemy ships actually leave some minerals or hardware to be used for repairs, often in sufficient numbers. The other part of the game is spent hunting the bigger ships, mostly mining vessels as their destruction detracts the enemy's ability to produce more units within each zone, and to find grid information for important locations not normally shown in the grid map. The game world is split into five zones, each larger than the last, which you can explore in any order you wish but jumping more than one zone will spell certain doom as you need the technology from the previous ones to survive (and unlock the more powerful hardware). The grid and zone maps work in some semi-turn-based fashion, with time passing when you move or when you hit the skip time button. Time also passes freely when inside a grid node, where the game runs in real-time - the enemy continues to produce new units, harvest other grid nodes, and move forces around, even bringing reinforcements occasionally in while you spend your time there. Overall it's a nice game, but towards the end, especially the final boss, you start wishing you hadn't touched the game in the first place - unless you have masochistic tendencies with video games.