Galactic Crew is, well, a game about taking your crew out into the galaxy to live, thrive and survive.
Set in a more or less top-down view, you can move your little crew members around your ship as you explore the quadrant, interacting in randomly occurring machines, trading and fighting with other ships, and occasionally returning to a star base to top up your supplies before heading into the big black yet again.
Your ships are fairly small affairs — a few rooms connected by the odd corridor or two. Basic ship rooms are all necessary — being shields, batteries, dorms and storage — but when you get a larger ship, some of those spare rooms can be retrofitted with new functionalities, like teleporters or prison cells for captives.
Ship-to-ship battles have fairly simple standard operating procedures: aim your weapons at the enemy and try and get their hit points to zero before yours get there, either through superior firepower or better repairs to stave off death. Onboard ship battles are also a thing, with boarding parties teleporting over armed with rifles. (If both crews teleport to the other ship simultaneously, you exchange ownership papers and fly off in your new ship). A ship’s health is represented as hull points (HP) and is a simple measure of how much plating you still have attached to your ship. Attacking a ship makes the HP go down and repairing it makes it go up — simples!
The core chunk of the game is in exploration, hopping around the randomly generated grid, interacting with the world. The random events that happen whenever you jump into a new sector help flesh out both you and the world, letting you play as you want: a pirate hunter, a trader or just a plain old murderous pirate.
Galactic Crew is currently in early access and while it does have a good amount of content, it doesn’t yet feel like it is worth its price tag. The graphics are very simple — while the game functions well, everything seems slightly flat and uninteresting. Hopefully with some more work and updates, more content will be added and current features will be revamped to truly carry out the developers’ vision.
All that aside, you can still see the vision and ideas behind Galactic Crew, and it is still a very interesting game.
Galactic Crew is available now for Windows PC.
