Slipways
Beetlewing · 2021 · Strategy, Puzzle, Turn-Based Strategy, Sandbox, Relaxing
PC
Very Positive93% · 2,21714playing now
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About Slipways
✦ AI summary
Build a spacefaring trade empire by colonizing planets and carefully connecting industries to support each other, with no combat or micromanagement slowing you down. Each quick 40-60 minute run is packed with strategic depth and puzzle-like decision-making, procedurally generated challenges, and wildly different tech trees that ensure no two games are ever alike.
Slipways takes the space grand strategy genre and condenses the best parts of it down by throwing away all the micromanagement and the steep learning curve. The result is a unique blend of the strategy and puzzle genres in which you can finish a run quickly, but still have a deep experience full of tough decisions.
Colonize planets, carefully pick industries and hook everything up so that your planets support each other. Line everything up just right and watch your colonies evolve and grow, giving you even more options for profitable trade. Make long-term plans and bask in your own glory when that one last connection makes six planets upgrade at the same time and gives you the income you desperately need.
There is no military aspect to pull your focus away from the economy. The game is more relaxed than your typical grand strategy. It's all about exploring space and its endless opportunities, shaping it to your whim and developing it to its full potential. No need for war with so much empty universe to claim.
Forget about tedious micromanagement and waiting for ships to be built. In Slipways, every action you take has immediate consequences, and every choice you make is of paramount importance. Your planets govern themselves while you focus on making the right decisions to get them what they need. You'll waste none of your precious time on busywork. A single run takes 40-60 minutes and they are all filled with the good stuff.
There are no boring technologies here. Instead of making a single building 20% more efficient, technologies in Slipways let you move planets at will, harness stars for energy or colonize planets with sentient machines instead of people. The selection varies each run, so you'll have to plan carefully and adapt to the situation at hand. The path you choose will profoundly change your experience and the way you look at the game's planets and resources.
When a single run takes no more than an hour, what you need is replayability. Almost everything in Slipways is procedurally generated and each sector of the galaxy offers wildly different challenges. To overcome these challenges, you'll enlist the help of the five races populating the empire, each with their own philosophical outlook, varied abilities and a dedicated slice of the technology tree. There are more than 80 technologies to choose from and you'll only be using about 10 of them each run. No two games are ever exactly alike.
The standard gameplay mode gives you 25 years to build the best empire you can, but there is more: a sandbox endless mode that allows you to experiment freely, and a ranked mode that lets you measure your skills against others around the world on pre-seeded maps.
The game also features a campaign mode with 13 scenarios, each of them introducing a new twist and refreshing the gameplay: from mysterious, ancient structures from the dawn of the galaxy to strange spacetime rifts splitting the galaxy in two. Once unlocked by playing the campaign, the new mechanics can also be used in other modes, becoming new options for even more varied runs.
MAKE TRADE, NOT WAR
Colonize planets, carefully pick industries and hook everything up so that your planets support each other. Line everything up just right and watch your colonies evolve and grow, giving you even more options for profitable trade. Make long-term plans and bask in your own glory when that one last connection makes six planets upgrade at the same time and gives you the income you desperately need.
There is no military aspect to pull your focus away from the economy. The game is more relaxed than your typical grand strategy. It's all about exploring space and its endless opportunities, shaping it to your whim and developing it to its full potential. No need for war with so much empty universe to claim.
FASTER THAN LIGHT
Forget about tedious micromanagement and waiting for ships to be built. In Slipways, every action you take has immediate consequences, and every choice you make is of paramount importance. Your planets govern themselves while you focus on making the right decisions to get them what they need. You'll waste none of your precious time on busywork. A single run takes 40-60 minutes and they are all filled with the good stuff.
TECH IT UP A NOTCH
There are no boring technologies here. Instead of making a single building 20% more efficient, technologies in Slipways let you move planets at will, harness stars for energy or colonize planets with sentient machines instead of people. The selection varies each run, so you'll have to plan carefully and adapt to the situation at hand. The path you choose will profoundly change your experience and the way you look at the game's planets and resources.
...ONE MORE GAME?
When a single run takes no more than an hour, what you need is replayability. Almost everything in Slipways is procedurally generated and each sector of the galaxy offers wildly different challenges. To overcome these challenges, you'll enlist the help of the five races populating the empire, each with their own philosophical outlook, varied abilities and a dedicated slice of the technology tree. There are more than 80 technologies to choose from and you'll only be using about 10 of them each run. No two games are ever exactly alike.
PLAY IT YOUR WAY
The standard gameplay mode gives you 25 years to build the best empire you can, but there is more: a sandbox endless mode that allows you to experiment freely, and a ranked mode that lets you measure your skills against others around the world on pre-seeded maps.
The game also features a campaign mode with 13 scenarios, each of them introducing a new twist and refreshing the gameplay: from mysterious, ancient structures from the dawn of the galaxy to strange spacetime rifts splitting the galaxy in two. Once unlocked by playing the campaign, the new mechanics can also be used in other modes, becoming new options for even more varied runs.
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
Recommend with a two caveats. 1) This is a good game. But it's a small game and probably only worth buying while it's on sale. 2) This is not a game you can 'win'. It's effectively a score chaser game. In board game terms, it'd be a Solitare Euro. Now, it is quite difficult and that helps it be interesting but ultimately it's a game where each run lasts an arbitrary number of turns and your goal is to score as high as possible in that duration. If this isn't an objective style you can hack, I would not recomend you pick this up.2 found this helpful
Fun little game. Absolutely ♥♥♥♥ some of the campaign levels though1 found this helpful
Very frustrating. Tried hard to get into it, I understand that this game is built to make it tricky, but for short term gamers like me, its no fun. Its like watching your favourite football team lose every week.....kinda depressing.......better to choose something more upbeat and positive.
Enjoyable puzzle/logistics rougelike with huge replay value and skill ceiling
Slipways is stupendously compelling on an extremely easy to understand skeleton; I barely needed the tutorials to get to grips, and when it introduces something new it will stop you and go, read this, make sure you understand before you continue. This doesn't happen often enough to be obstructing, and is only ever helpful in explaining new resources and mechanics. Runs are short enough to be enough for a run here and there or a couple as a playsession, though sometimes I wish I had a extended mode, 40-50 years instead of 25. But maybe that'd feel too much; it's hard to know if it's in that goldilocks just right zone, but it does make for good play patterns of changing your focus from expansion to tying up loose ends and seeing if you can stretch for one more council task. Some perks do seem a lot better than others and some seem quite bad, but given you always have 10 choices between the 5 races, you're never locked to suffering with one that's terrible. It has good mode variety, it's just... good. I picked it up for £7, but I think I would have been happy to pay £14 for a game like this. Simple but deep, complex and with plenty of variety and replayability. The soundtrack is al…
El juego es demasiado difícil. tiene una curva de aprendizaje bastante larga y, a pesar de ello, no llego. No pude pasar ni la mitad de la campaña. Si hago algo mal, no veo cómo podría hacer mejor. Me rindo...
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