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Scholar
- Joined
- Aug 11, 2015
- Messages
- 156
I've been meaning to pimp Slipways for some time now here. It's a recent space-themed resource management game with surprisingly polished execution for a (mostly) one-man auteur project. In my opinion Slipways' promotion shoots itself in the foot when it's described as a "4X grand strategy game without combat" or something similar to that, when the game is instead a Traveling Salesman Multi-track Drifting Optimization puzzle game at its core. The space theme is mostly incidental, and I think its closest comparable could be something like Mini Metro.
The game world is a randomly generated universe of planets floating in space. Each planet has resource(s) that it exports and resource(s) that it wants to import. The titular slipways are paths that connect two planets to each other for trading purposes and each fulfilled import brings some yearly revenue to your account. The simple premise gets more complex with several catches, the most important of which is that slipways can't cross each other. Furthermore, planet types aren't known before they've been scanned, planets' import/export capacity grows as they get involved in the intergalactic economy, and so on. Planet #1 produces water, which it delivers to Planet #2 where they mine iron ore, which is delivered to Planet #3 which makes robots that are sent to Planet #1 so they can produce more water. The miners for Planet #2 were naturally imported from some other Planet #4 and you have to start finding someplace to deliver the surplus water Planet #1 now produces. There's always somewhere to expand or something to optimize.
Building slipways, colonizing planets, sending probes, and other actions cost both money and time in 1 month segments. Money tends to be an issue at the beginning, time at the end. The whole game lasts for 25 years which amounts to a pleasant 1 hour of real life clicking and thinking.
The game is priced at a very reasonable 15$ level and while it does get stale after enough runs, I found it replayable. Besides the distribution of planets changing from one game to another, you have a Board of Directors with 3 selectable alien races that gives different semi-randomized benefits and researchable technologies for each game. The tech tree can change your economy in fundamental ways: the inventions start from Iceball planet colonies and end with synthesizing resources from empty space. Of course, any investment into research comes at the cost of improving your economy so it's another tradeoff to balance.
There's even a campaign with some more gimmicky-yet-entertaining levels: Create an enclosed barrier with your slipways around a slowly expanding black void. Find a precursor relic megastructure and connect loads of research labs to it. Naturally you have to meet these objectives within the same 25 years and not go bankrupt in the process.
For a small project, the audiovisual presentation is really polished. The slipways look sleek while pumping their contents between planets, audio effects are pleasant ethereal plink plonks, the time rewind effect looks cool. It looks like the semi-casual game it is at heart while managing to avoid any shovelware aesthetics.
The dev is planning one more large update to the game later on this year, which will at least include the final campaign levels and some more quality-of-life improvements. I'll revisit this then unless the urge hits again.
A bunch of full reviews. Don't think I've ever seen a negative one anywhere:
https://explorminate.co/slipways-review/
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/slipways-review
The game world is a randomly generated universe of planets floating in space. Each planet has resource(s) that it exports and resource(s) that it wants to import. The titular slipways are paths that connect two planets to each other for trading purposes and each fulfilled import brings some yearly revenue to your account. The simple premise gets more complex with several catches, the most important of which is that slipways can't cross each other. Furthermore, planet types aren't known before they've been scanned, planets' import/export capacity grows as they get involved in the intergalactic economy, and so on. Planet #1 produces water, which it delivers to Planet #2 where they mine iron ore, which is delivered to Planet #3 which makes robots that are sent to Planet #1 so they can produce more water. The miners for Planet #2 were naturally imported from some other Planet #4 and you have to start finding someplace to deliver the surplus water Planet #1 now produces. There's always somewhere to expand or something to optimize.
Building slipways, colonizing planets, sending probes, and other actions cost both money and time in 1 month segments. Money tends to be an issue at the beginning, time at the end. The whole game lasts for 25 years which amounts to a pleasant 1 hour of real life clicking and thinking.
The game is priced at a very reasonable 15$ level and while it does get stale after enough runs, I found it replayable. Besides the distribution of planets changing from one game to another, you have a Board of Directors with 3 selectable alien races that gives different semi-randomized benefits and researchable technologies for each game. The tech tree can change your economy in fundamental ways: the inventions start from Iceball planet colonies and end with synthesizing resources from empty space. Of course, any investment into research comes at the cost of improving your economy so it's another tradeoff to balance.
There's even a campaign with some more gimmicky-yet-entertaining levels: Create an enclosed barrier with your slipways around a slowly expanding black void. Find a precursor relic megastructure and connect loads of research labs to it. Naturally you have to meet these objectives within the same 25 years and not go bankrupt in the process.
For a small project, the audiovisual presentation is really polished. The slipways look sleek while pumping their contents between planets, audio effects are pleasant ethereal plink plonks, the time rewind effect looks cool. It looks like the semi-casual game it is at heart while managing to avoid any shovelware aesthetics.
The dev is planning one more large update to the game later on this year, which will at least include the final campaign levels and some more quality-of-life improvements. I'll revisit this then unless the urge hits again.
A bunch of full reviews. Don't think I've ever seen a negative one anywhere:
https://explorminate.co/slipways-review/
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/slipways-review
