Review: The Spatials

April 2, 2015 Ailingforale

The Spatials is yet another game that came out of nowhere for me and what a nice surprise it is. I’m fairly big fan of the city-building sim genre (except for The Sims for reasons I won’t go into now) and Weird and Wry decided to put the genre in space. (It may have been done before, but this is a first for myself.) With a bit of a nostalgic Star Trek look and a bit more complication in the genre than I’ve played, The Spatials has taken a lot of my time lately and I’ll gladly give it more.

That's one of my newly arrived Lemurians busting a move on the dance floor like a boss. — That’s one of my newly arrived Lemurians busting a move on the dance floor like a boss. I wouldn’t mind more people on the dance floor, but it probably because I don’t have the booze yet…

So you start with just an air-lock and you build out from there. You can build a lot of different facilities that one would expect like sleeping and storage areas, but once you get a little further in you can build bars with dance floors (which the humans aren’t too fond of weirdly enough) and sell fancy drinks. I had to do a lot of extra work to get the ingredients to be able to make the drinks, but what are you going to do. I also haven’t got to build a Duty Free shop, but I’m on my way. With as many airports as I’ve been in during my life… I kind of need one in my space port or it just won’t feel finished. *Insert end-game goal here!*

*EDIT* In the middle of writing this I realized that I actually have built the Duty Free shop so the new goal is the build the second version of it and a freaking Holoarea because it's a Holode... Holoarea and that's awesome! — *EDIT* In the middle of writing this I realized that I have actually built the Duty Free shop so the new goal is the build the second version of it and a freaking Holoarea because it’s a Holode… Holoarea and that’s awesome! (Yes I could have just edited the line above about having built one, but this also gave a good excuse to show the tech tree in all it’s interconnected-ness.) It’s not complicated, just interconnected.

That does bring up a few things that weren’t the clearest in the tutorial. Granted, some of the issues I had could have been solved by… you know… reading, but that’s neither here nor there. Sometimes you’ll do a tutorial and just assume that you can handle the rest of it. Well it turns out, I’m not capable of handling The Spatials without reading the in-game notes (go figure). It is good to know ahead of time, for those of you who haven’t picked it up, that you can build facilities that create items that use materials you can’t get for a while. It is easy enough to unlock more solar systems, but the difficulty goes up as well.

As your people level up, so do their cravings. Derek here is a man after my own hear craving his desert. At the point I'm at now I need to have the shower stations stocked with soap so that everyone (and I do mean everyone) can get cleaned up. Apparently space is dirty. I had to double the amount of shower areas for everyone including my visitors to be satisfied. — As your people level up, so do their cravings. Derek here is a man after my own heart craving his desert. At the point I’m at now, I need to have the shower stations stocked with soap so that everyone (and I do mean everyone) can get cleaned up. Apparently space is dirty. I had to double the amount of shower areas for everyone, including my visitors, to be satisfied.

Moving on from there you build the places where food and/or goods get created. Then you also have to create a place for your people and the visitors to your space station to purchase or consume the goods. That means if you make a kitchen to make a pizza, you’ll also need a cafeteria where you can sit down and enjoy it (or procure it and enjoy it in this instance). It makes sense, but it’s a nice touch that adds a little complexity. I really enjoyed figuring it out and the process of making the space station work efficiently. To really get it, you’ll want to have a bit of everything crafted just in case someone comes in and is craving pizza or yogurt or a cold one for those who like their drinks shaken, but not stirred (if you’re over 21 of course). You’ve got to be prepared.

Play The Spatials, explore strange new worlds, meet interesting pirates and set your phasers to hurt! — Play *The Spatials*, explore strange new worlds, meet interesting pirates and set your phasers to hurt! The more you “pacify” the more loot you get. You do want upgrades right? Yes? Then go forth and make the universe a more peaceful place.

If you want to be completely prepared you’ll have to work for it. While you can expand and conquer more planets, that won’t really help you get enough supplies to be able to create everything fast enough to keep all of your people and visitors clean and satisfied. After beating a mission on a planet, you should go back and beat the harder difficulty setting to double-up on the supplies you get from the planet. (The “WTF” difficulty in later levels are not very nice.) Also, remember to hire more people so that you can get your supplies faster as well keep everything running at home. It’s a delicate balance between hiring too many, making the right products and having just enough for everyone. The nice part is that it’s not really frustrating to do this, it’s actually quite fun. I’m not completely sure how Weird & Wry managed this, but they did a great job.

Last thing, because I see people complaining about this, there is a little complexity to this game. Not a lot. It’s not overly difficult if you’ve got the capacities to read and remember things. While you may be maintaining your space station and making everyone happy by supplying the proper goods DON’T FORGET YOUR AWAY TEAM! People complaining about how “you can’t raise their happiness levels back up in time to keep them from leaving” aren’t being very observant. When you’re out on missions, you get hungry running around blasting fools and picking things up. Not to mention how dirty you must get. You need to give your people time to get cleaned up or yeh, they will leave. Wouldn’t you? All work and no soap or food make these Spatials look for another port were their fun-meter can be filled properly. (You know… like my station when the bar will actually serves drinks…)

If you couldn’t tell by all the gushing I’ve been doing during this review… I like The Spatials. Like I’ve mentioned before on Facebook and Twitter, if you’ve liked other city/base-building sims, you should buy The Spatials. With all the building options and intricacies there are to be had and rearranging your base that needs to be done so it’s not ugly, there’s a lot to do here. That and the missions are very entertaining and often quite humorous. The game is well done and a lot of fun. It’s nice to have a game that will give you a good smile along the way.

More The Spatials Info: Steam / Official Page / Facebook / Twitter