A 2020 video game developed by Runner Duck and published by
Curve Digital,
Space Crew is a sequel to their popular
Roguelike video game
Bomber Crew, where you control a single spaceship and all the crew members aboard in real time.
This game provides examples of the following tropes:
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Like the previous game, even though you work for the Earth government, you have to earn credits to upgrade your ship.
- Alien Invasion: The game begins in one.
- Amazing Technicolor Population: Aside from regular human skin colors, your crew can have blue or green skin if you like.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- Compared to the previous instalment, things are tweaked to make the game UX smoother:
- You start off with enough crew members to man all weapons (that is, you can get away with not having anyone at comms or security), so if you don't want to you don't have to constantly zoom in and out to manage both crew and battlefield.
- You can zoom out a lot further, which allows you to get a better grip on the combat situation.
- There's a Slow Time button to briefly slow the action down if things get overwhelming
- If you lose your ship and entire crew, you will have to buy completely new personal equipment for their replacements, but at least some of the upgrades you bought for your previous ship will transfer over to the new craft, and you can recruit new crew at the same primary skill level.
- Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Although your ship has nine stations, you can only take a maximum of six crewmen in classic mode or seven by adjusting the difficulty.
- Artificial Brilliance: Once a crewman picks up a piece of equipment (rifle, fire extinguisher, medpack) you just have to command them to use the item, and they'll automatically move to attack a boarder, extinguish a fire, or revive a downed crewman.
- Artificial Stupidity: On higher difficulty levels, you have to tag attacking fighters and boarders for your gunners to begin firing on them, even if the fighters have already wounded your crew or ship.
- Bittersweet Ending: Earth is saved... at the cost of your spaceship and the crew you oversee yourself save the ones not on board.
- Boarding Party: Phasmids will sometimes send boarders onto your ship to damage systems and crewmen.
- The Cavalry: Your crew can summon friendly space fighters to help you periodically.
- Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Normally, you need to hold down RMB to pan the camera. In Targeting Mode however, moving the mouse automatically pans the camera while holding down RMB places a waypoint. This can result in you placing unwanted waypoints when you just wanted to look around for enemies.
- Early Game Hell: At the start of the game, your ship is badly armored, underpowered, and manned by a crew with very poor skills. Even your trained gunners have a hit percentage of under 50% until they gain a few levels. Worst of all is that there is very little variety in the missions until you complete the first story quest. Until then, you'll be stuck doing the same boring patrol, escort, and station evacuation missions over and over again.
- Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Near the climax you must drop an anti-matter bomb on the Phasmid homeworld to destroy it. Then the moon opens up to reveal the Phasmid Queen.
- Easy Logistics: You don't have to worry about fuel or ammo for your kinetic weapons. The only limited resource you have to deal with is the med bay, which can run out of supplies when used too much.
- Escape Pod: Your ship starts with
one. Though you can buy more with upgrades. - Escort Mission: One mission type involves escorting a freighter on a cargo run, and it's about as infuriating as you would expect. While the freighter is well armored, its pilot is a braindead moron who will do nothing but mindlessly fly to his destination with no regard for attacking fighters. This means he will not only sit perfectly still for the two full minutes it takes to activate the jump drive while in the presence of the enemy, but once he's ready to jump, he'll do it immediately, without waiting for you. This routinely results in him getting blown to hell at the next nav point while you are stuck at your current one dealing with enemy fighters and unable to assist.
- Evolving Title Screen: In the beginning the main menu depicts an ongoing invasion with the monument being spared of the Phasmid's razing. After finishing the game, the place is rebuilt, and you can see kids picnic around the monument - now fully rebuilt and featuring your crew.
- Heroic Sacrifice: To beat the Phasmid Queen you have to detonate your ship's reactor right inside her. Which means at least one crewman has stay aboard the ship before the last jump.
- Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Zigzagged. While kinetic weapons do not require power, freeing up energy which can be routed to other systems, energy weapons are more powerful when fully powered.
- No One Gets Left Behind: If a crewman is M.I.A. after abandoning ship, there's a chance you can get a followup mission to rescue them.
- Portal Network: Your ship used jump gates to engage in long range travel around the Solar System.
- Power-Up Letdown: You can upgrade your shields and power plant, but the heavier shields take longer to recharge, and larger power plants are more vulnerable to damage.
- Rousing Speech: The captain's "inspirational speech" ability can heal crewmen and help restore crew abilities.
- Subsystem Damage: As per the original game, your ship can lose multiple systems that have to be repaired.
- Sudden Downer Ending: In an example that made Darkest Dungeon more hopeful in comparison, you can't absolutely finish the game without any casualties. In the end, you are forced to trigger the self-destruct inside a moon-sized alien.
- Womb Level: The final objective has you hyperjump inside the Phasmid Queen and then triggering the self-destruct inside the queen.
