OK, so I've got a few hours down in this so far. Infinite Space is a collaboration between Platinum Games and Nude Maker, published by Sega.



Yuri is a young guy who wants to travel the "sea of stars." Usually I would lump him in with cheeky protagonists I want to kill like Alex from Lunar or Vyse from Skies of Arcadia, but his desire runs deeper than just wanting adventure for the sake of adventure. Yuri hates the mudball he's living on and wants to explore the mystery of an artifact left to him by his father.

And his planet certainly does suck, the founder of his colony forbids any space travel. And its all just because the old bastard once was a space-faring adventurer and now he's old so he's and doesn't want any punk kids outshining his exploits.

And so Yuri hires Nia - a pilot for hire (I'd Kessel her Run for many parsecs) - to get him off-world. And so his life as a "Zero G Dog" begins. Nia fixes Yuri up with a ship of his own and their adventures begin.



The game flows a lot like a point-and-click adventure on the planets you'll visit and much like those games the story won't really progress until you've milked the NPCs for each bit of text they can spit out. There are a lot of planets to see so make sure you've gotten the skinny out of all NPCs before plotting a course to the next world or you'll have to go alllllll the way back dodging or fighting enemy vessels all the way.

The RPG/Sim stuff comes in the ship customizations and space combat. Combat is done in real time in a paper-rock-scissors fashion. Dodges will avoid multi-hit barrage attacks, but not evade normal attacks. You also want to dart and weave in and out of firing range. You start out with only those three options - Dodge, Normal and Barrage - but three other tactics will be added as the game progresses.

The action plays out like something straight out of a Star Trek episode, though perhaps not as pretty. You'll hear the crew spouting techno-babble as they prepare the next volley of lasers and photon attacks. You can sit there and watch it play out or tap the screen to fast-forward over it.

Now, there is a catch here - there are no HP bars for your ship or those of the enemy ships. More or less, the game is expecting you to have made a note of your ship's HP before you left the last space dock.. I don't know if this changes, but early on you're going to want to dock in space ports as much as possible.

This has benefits, not only is there time for repairs and remodeling, but crew morale is improved for some R-and-R so they'll function better in combat. Crew morale can also be boosted by having optimal living space on your ship. This allows your ships moves to recharge faster, as everyone's happy. Things start to slow down once the crew becomes fatigued.

So far, though, it is looking like an RPG for the spreadsheet-loving, number crunching nerd. You could spend hours customizing ships, assigning crewmen to posts and so on. You can control a fleet of up to five ships. There's also a Vs. mode you can do with friends, but local 1-on-1 only, no online

There was a pretty nice anime-style intro that sums up the first hour and a half of the game right at the start, but I've seen no more of such scenes since I started the game. Might be something deeper in. All the voice acting I've heard thus far is set to the battle scenes with techno-babble.

It does play up the sci-fi drama vibe pretty well and I've only gotten my feet wet, but its looking to be a quite ambitious little game, just know it takes its sim elements rather seriously. Also know that Sega published this in small quantities, so if you're remotely interested in the game, better to grab it sooner than later.