Infinite Space III: Sea of Stars

Needs a fantasy skin

Everything about this game is inferior to its predecessor. Everyone has already made plenty of valid criticisms of the game but here I go anyway: • 3D makes everything more complicated and time-consuming without adding any value whatsoever. • The UI is TERRIBLE. It's weirdly amateur compared to Weird Worlds. It's clumsy, time-wasting, space-wasting, poorly organized, and just UGLY. The flatness and transparency make the whole thing hard to look at and intuit, and actions that were simple in Weird Worlds are more complicated and clumsy here. Some of the icons, graphical elements, and text render as blown-up blurry bitmaps on a retina display, rather than starting with large art that's scaled down for lower resolutions, and scalable vector objects for models, lines, icons, and text. The ship models are insanely simplistic, low detail, cartoonish (which would be fine if they MATCHED the style of the art elsewhere in the game, but they don't), and just plain ugly compared to this game's predecessor. Their textures are super low resolution where there even are any. It's an entirely non-unified style and nothing looks like it belongs with anything else. I felt like I was looking at placeholder graphics instead of final designs. I don't know if that's what actually happened or if this is just more of the usual "flat minimalist" fad nonsense that has ruined SO MUCH software since 2013. • Nothing new here of merit. The new elements I experienced in 2 hours were almost nonexistent. It's mostly the same as Weird Worlds, including some reused art & music (the reused art is of course even lower resolution than the low res art in this game). • The gameplay is entirely unsatisfying: In 2.1 hours, I've only gone through three sessions and lost all three times. Even after collecting every useful item and upgrading and throwing a whole flotilla of ships at a quest enemy, it was a massive failure. But that would be okay if the run-through was quick. They aren't. They're tedious. Most of my time was spent rotating the stupid 3D star-map just to figure out where things are in relation to each other, where I was, what was at the places I'd visited, etc. The majority of the game time was spent trying to SEE the game, basically. In Weird Worlds, that same amount of time spent would've given me 6+ sessions and a mixture of wins & losses. Weird Worlds was a 20 minute space opera. This game is a slow exercise in patience, and it wore mine out. I paid $1.06 for this on Winter sale discount and that's the only way I was ever going to experience it, because I watched the development and knew this was going to be a bad game (and read other people's reviews). Now I have my own personal experience with it and I'm glad I paid so little for it. It's a massive shame. All the resources, time, and effort wasted on this clumsy and ugly game could have been FAR BETTER spent on making an HD remaster of Weird Worlds, placing whatever new content there is here into THAT FAR SUPERIOR GAME. I'd happily spend much more money on THAT than what I paid for this. This game, I will probably uninstall.

I found many hours of enjoyment in the first two Infinite Space games, and this is more of the same - now with 3D graphics. Its fundamentally the same proto-roguelite formula: pick a starship, explore a procedurally-arranged sector hoping for the wacky random drops to align, and then desperately try and head off whatever end-game condition you stumbled into. I think the transition to 3D graphics is a bit of a mixed bag - the gameplay is still in two dimensions, and the low-poly 3D models aren't quite as readable as the detailed sprites of previous entries in the series. Still, it's good fun, it runs on modern computers, and if you like procedural run-based games it's well worth checking out one of the OGs

I like this game just as much as the first two games. It's a shame there aren't many (any?) mods. Listen, the 3d map isn't a big deal. It isn't necessary to rotate the map a whole lot to navigate. Hover your mouse over the locations closest to your current location. The game tells you how far the distance is and whether or not the star is in a nebula. Avoid nebulas until you have the appropriate drive. Learn to embrace the 3d map and you'll have a lot of fun with this game.

Its a bit basic and crashy

Yes very good but the combat is far too easy when using good tactics