Buzz Aldrin's Space Program Manager

BASPM is a gem for strategy fans. It nails the tension of the space race, making every decision, from R&D to rocket prep, feel meaningful. It’s not a quick-play game, but the payoff of a successful launch after careful planning is unbeatable. If you enjoy deep strategy and space history, this one’s a must.

Game is a bit old and runs perfectly smooth. But it is not fun at all, so I cannot recommend it. I do like Mars Horizon (have played through it twice) and similar games. But this is rng fest, and when you fail you get punished severely with degraded rocket reliability and load reliability. It seems AI follows "historical" dates and never fails, which just adds frustration because what is the point with competing with infallible AI. Interface is another nightmare, and you have to *know* which guys can do training and which skills will be used in next launch, because it is shown nowhere. I once forgot and sent launch coordinator to training and then second best had like 50% needed skill. Only way to fix it was to take my main guy off training and lose a lot of money, or roll back to previous save. So yea, weakest of competitors. Pick Mars Horizon, where AI can fail their tasks properly and gameplay is more fun.

This is a really fun game and I do recommend this for those who enjoy a management simulation type environment with competition as you try and beat the other side in the space race. There are also some really great graphics and cut-scenes as well as some enthralling alternate history scenarios (such as a dual craft meeting of the Mercury capsules or pursuing the Gemini program all the way to the moon). The single and biggest downside is a complete lack of history in the game characters - all of the mission controllers, astronauts, and scientists are photos and names of people who helped fund the game and there no historical characters that you can recruit, train, and send into space (with the exception of Buzz Aldrin). Also, this game has not been updated in years and what you see is pretty much what you will always get.

If you ever have played the boardgame Liftoff, this is the digital counterpart. In an all not to difficult way, but quite deep in its decision making process it gives you the possibility to conduct a space race to reach the moon, before your counterpart does, respectively in the role of the USA or USSR. Not being overly complicated, it gives you the feeling and the immersion in this specific historical era. If you accompany it with the lecture of some good book about the time period it will completely absorb you and really shine. The fact the you invest in components and use them to get them better and more reliable is faszinating and brings you always on the brink of the question if they are really ready or not. Should you launch or not? If you have an interest in the subject and the era you cannot be wrong and the game will really give you a hint about how it feels “on the evening right before the launch”.

This is a 14 year old remake of the 33 year old game, Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space, bearing the name of the once respected but now disgraced (due to political affiliations) second guy to walk on the moon. As far as games go this isn't a winner... you might expect with a name like "Space Program Manager" you'll be doing some space simulation, or base building... well, you'd be wrong. This is a game for people who like menus. Lots of menus. In fact, the entirety of the game is just static 2D windows... might as well have been a browser game. This isn't a simulator game or anything remotely like that, interaction is a bare minimum. This is basically a tycoon game where you manage staff, funding and projects by clicking through menus then ticking along until you see the outcome. This core game design is incredibly flawed and your runs will be hammered by RNG... and as soon as you get a failure, it sets you on the same popular trajectory as Buzz Aldrin... endorsing utter failure and collapse, with disastrous results. Since the game is 100% menus, you'd think they'd have to be pretty damned good menus, wouldn't you? Well, again, you're wrong. This is from Slitherine, and they are staying true to their brand here as they always do... you can't deny their fidelity. This is a complete train wreck of a UI married to an underdelivering yet stupidly over priced mess. Just like every game from Slitherine. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text/images... it might as well be a web page. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC. Due to the age of this game, and the lack of modernisation, the graphics appear quite dated. This compares poorly to more contemporary games with professional standards. Given that gaming is primarily a visual medium, this is a bit of a problem, so should be taken into account when considering whether to get this game. While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals. The game features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/flash games. While the artwork itself, while mediocre, might be considered passable, the visual presentation here is negligible, it might as well be a slideshow or a Youtube video. Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids had more advanced animation and visuals going on than this game does. The controls can't be customised because the game doesn't really have any interface beyond menus and simple UI controls no different from dialog boxes in Windows Explorer. If you think about it, this barely counts as an "interactive" game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play fully immersive games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. These technical shortcomings push this game below minimum standards for any competently developed modern PC game. Let's talk about pricing and the actual value this has for gamers. Is this game one of the best of the 175,000+ games on Steam? Buzz Aldrin's Space Program Manager has the ridiculous, laughable price of $30 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. For comparison, the $30 asking price for this game could get you games like "Cyberpunk 2077", "Sekiro Shadows Die Twice" or "Hogwarts Legacy". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. There's enough defects and quality problems with this game that it's really impossible to recommend to gamers. $30 for a 14 year old 2D menu game. What a joke.

Great Fun.

Fun game