Smugglers 3 hearkens back to an earlier generation of 4X space exploration and conquest games. In a way, it's the sort of game I might have played on my old Apple II--but of course much prettier graphics.

You're a starship captain during an interstellar civil war, belonging to one of four factions in the war. Your primary activities involve trading (including smuggling illegal goods, if you so choose); accepting combat missions in support of your faction; or becoming a pirate and attacking planets. As usual in games like this, you start off with a tiny ship, and progress is mainly in the form of earning enough money and rising in rank so that you can get bigger and better ships.

This optional add-on expands the basic full version of the most-popular space trading game Smugglers 3 by many exciting features making it a must-have for everyone.

A Little History

SpiritWars premiered in 1998 on WON.net, Sierra's now defunct online game service, and when WON was purchased by the Flipside network and was merged into their casual game service, Randy Chase, the developer, decided to keep it going, running it himself. The game's enthusiastic fans followed him off the service, and have kept it going ever since. Now in version 3.0, it's been iterartively developed over the years until it now contains a veritable wealth of different 'spirits' and maps, and has become a highly polished, smooth-playing game. This is, of course, one of the advantages of this kind of online game; it gets better with age and polish.

Tasty Risk-4X Hybrid

From Apezone, developers of the excellent games Starships Unlimited and Battleship Chess comes this new title--an interesting combination of the tropes of the "4X" genre (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) and the mechanics of Risk.

Risk is, of course, a fine game, and has been the basis of some well-conceived computer games (notably Lux Delux); but it is so familiar a style as to be somewhat jejune. Starship Kingdoms adds a high degree of interest by incorporating technology development, putting production more directly under the players' control, and pitching the game as a struggle between two "major houses," with much of the galaxy controlled by neutrals who may join the weaker side in the mid-game.

Technologies players can develop include beam and missile weapons, armor, and star drives. The outcome of a battle depends not only on the number of ships in the opposing forces, but also on their relative technologies. (Battles are played out in attractive 3D.) Each turn, players are faced with a choice between devoting resources to additional ship construction, or advancing their technology--trade-offs such as these often make for interesting gameplay.

One of the flaws of Risk as a game is that the strong get stronger; the more continents you control, the more quickly you can overwhelm your opponents. Thus, the end-game is often dull--the strongest mopping up the weaker. Starship Kingdom counters this by having the 'neutrals' join the weaker side in mid-game, thus rebalancing the game and ensuring that the remainder retains interest.

Starship Kingdom has a wide variety of starmaps, which ensures repeat playability, and is playable both as a single-player game (against an AI opponent), as well as online, against another live player.

Starship as Hero

Starships Unlimited 3 has all the usual tropes of the 4X genre--a galaxy to explore, a deep tech tree, diplomacy with alien races--but with a major difference. The emphasis is, as the name suggests, on your starships. They're highly customizable, and the construction system makes each one you (or your opponents) build considerably more expensive than the last, so that even the largest civilization rarely has more than a dozen in play. This actually works to the game's advantage, because the starships become your protagonists, each individually interesting, and the missions they embark on have something of the feel of Star Trek to them, rather than being another mundane task in the long and (often) tedious grind of a typical 4X game.

2003 Independent Games Festival Finalist
Buy This Game and Get Plasmaworm as a Free Bonus

Here's how a typical game works: You spend 20 hours or more pounding through a series of pre-planned linear obstacles, very often hurling your controller across the room or banging on your desk in frustration as you meet a boss that seems well nigh impossible until you go read a walk-through... And when you are done, you are done, because you've finished, and why would you ever want to play it again?

Here's how Strange Adventures in Infinite Space works: You spend twenty minutes or less, you have a satisfying game experience, and there is never a moment of frustration... if you fail it doesn't really matter because you can always start another game. And when it's done, you find yourself saying "damn, it's over already? I want to play again."