Infinite Space III: Sea of Stars

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

Feels very unpolished compared to the previous entries and is a 3D reskin of the second game (Buy that instead!) but my main issue is with the user interface. Aside from the needless complexity of 3D navigation the user interface scaling is super weir. Icons are massive and the text is tiny and difficult to real. The layout of icons and scaling feels like this was intended to be a phone game and it really doesn't work on PC. For instance in the previous game I could have the inventory, and trade interface open at the same time but you have to click back and forth many times to navigate menus which is the opposite of the design principals of previous games. Also the survey scans are so bad, they blink over the entire screen in waves and combined with the super saturated colors its difficult to look at for any length of time.

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.