Infinite Space III: Sea of Stars

For each thing they fixed, they broke several more. Just play Weird Worlds instead.

Meh, what a pity. Loved Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space. Why they went with a fiddly 3D map is beyond me. Waste of time and space trying to work out where you are and the closest destination. Also, in battle sometimes ships don't fire despite orders. This sequel is a messy attempt from the devs who could have put their time to other projects rather than this garbled wreck of a game. Very disappointed. I'll just go back to the first two instead as they are exactly the same in many respects, with less frustration.

A simple 3D version of Infinite Space 2, after getting used to the sometimes quirky interface it quickly felt familiar again and gave me the same joy as the second game. I did notice that rare events occur much more in this one, but that keeps things interesting.

I found many hours of enjoyment in the first two Infinite Space games, and this is more of the same - now with 3D graphics. Its fundamentally the same proto-roguelite formula: pick a starship, explore a procedurally-arranged sector hoping for the wacky random drops to align, and then desperately try and head off whatever end-game condition you stumbled into. I think the transition to 3D graphics is a bit of a mixed bag - the gameplay is still in two dimensions, and the low-poly 3D models aren't quite as readable as the detailed sprites of previous entries in the series. Still, it's good fun, it runs on modern computers, and if you like procedural run-based games it's well worth checking out one of the OGs

Everything about this game is inferior to its predecessor. Everyone has already made plenty of valid criticisms of the game but here I go anyway: • 3D makes everything more complicated and time-consuming without adding any value whatsoever. • The UI is TERRIBLE. It's weirdly amateur compared to Weird Worlds. It's clumsy, time-wasting, space-wasting, poorly organized, and just UGLY. The flatness and transparency make the whole thing hard to look at and intuit, and actions that were simple in Weird Worlds are more complicated and clumsy here. Some of the icons, graphical elements, and text render as blown-up blurry bitmaps on a retina display, rather than starting with large art that's scaled down for lower resolutions, and scalable vector objects for models, lines, icons, and text. The ship models are insanely simplistic, low detail, cartoonish (which would be fine if they MATCHED the style of the art elsewhere in the game, but they don't), and just plain ugly compared to this game's predecessor. Their textures are super low resolution where there even are any. It's an entirely non-unified style and nothing looks like it belongs with anything else. I felt like I was looking at pla…

Very satisfying Sci-Fi roguelike in a huge universe.