The Goblin Lunatics have just released v1.0 of their game 10 Min Space Strategy (10mSS) which you can download for free from either Golbin Lunatics homepage or the SpaceSimCentral download area. I have played 10 Min Space Strategy for a few hours now and I have had different experiences where the game didn’t last 10mins, more like 4mins (and I got owned) and one that took about an hour to complete, which I eventually won.
When you start a new game, you pick between one of six races (Mechanized Menance, Silicantis, Tentacle, Insectoid, Amazon and Human) and each of these races has their own race specific abilities (Credo), six types to pick from. Then you have some trait points to use, the trait points are already distributed and you can take the defaults or customize your character even more. Once you do all that you are now ready to play a game, so just need to pick out how many opponents you want to face and the size of the hex map to play on. The game starts with a small area of the map visible to you and this changes as you explore/grow your empire. You can develop planets you own and use colony ships to colonize planets under your control or create a space station.
There is various anomalies and debris fields that you can send ships to that will give you small benefits like population growth, research improvements and production speed. Once you have plotted all your moves and chose the research path (Environment, Industry, Propulsion, Empire and Warfare) you are developing you end your turn. The computer AI moves are very quick so your game can go by really quickly if you know what you are doing. If you look closely at the ‘Empire Details’ page it will show you some special research traits that you can strive to attain to help with your conquest.
Pros/Cons of 10 Min Space Strategy:
Pros:
- There is actually more depth to the game than what I expected with race/research traits
- Adjustable map and planet density controls
- Music sets the right mood
- AI is competitive
- Tooltips were descriptive to make understanding the games menus/items much easier
Cons:
- Same graphic models for all of the ships. Only thing that changed was the color. Since there is different races it would have been nice to have each race have their own style of ships.
- Would have liked to see a more animated background
- I noticed a few times only on the larger maps and using all the race slots for the game that it can get into a endless condition. I had the game going on auto-pilot for 30+ mins and 2000+ turns later and the game was a deadlock. Think there needs to have some logic that will call a winner or make the game a draw after so many turns.
- This is only a small issue. But the divide forces screen could have been more informative in which side to place resources to move to a given destination.
Conclusion:
Overall 10 Min Space Strategy is a nice 4x style game that can give you many hours of fun. With everything randomized you have a lot of replayability. I am hard pressed to really find any big flaws with this game. It is fast loading, AI is good, gameplay is challenging and the game never crashed once. Yeah the graphics could be a bit better and maybe add some more music tracks but overall its a job well done Goblin Lunatics. I hope the developer does decide to expand on to this game and if they do I would like to see some of the following:
- Maybe short 1-3 mission campaign modes with short storylines
- Team play 2vs2, 3vs3 and 4vs4
- LAN or Multiplayer functionality
- Ability to mod some of the game assets like graphics, backgrounds and music
- Since this game is free on the PC, you guys need to make some money so convert this to work on mobile platforms it is almost perfect for that platform.
I would give 10 Min Space Strategy a score of 85 out out 100 just because of how easy the game is to grasp and the features you do have available to you in this quick/easy game. Make sure you give this game a try and let us know what you think and make sure you do let the developers know what you think of it as well so maybe we can see more development on 10min Space Strategy game in the future.
Checkout this in-game trailer of the game: