Space Raiders in Space is a tower defense and squad management game.
Your squad of up to eight soldiers has to build defenses such as wood barricades, turrets, traps, and more to survive several waves of bugs. Each soldier can carry two weapons (one gun and one close-combat weapon). There are three resources that you need and can gather between waves.
With these resources, you can build new defenses. Food is used to heal your soldiers.
Another important thing for survival is squad management. You need to give orders all the time. Between waves, you need to tell them to search, build, repair, or swap weapons. Weapons degrade over time and can eventually break. When bugs attack, you can tell your soldiers to go into defense, attack, or coward mode. Each of these have their own pros and cons.
It’s also very important to constantly check your defenses. They will break after taking enough damage. You can repair them for a price which is still cheaper than having to build them again.
The story mode is around six hours long. The story is told through the pages of a comic book with accompanying voice-overs. The voice acting is good enough, especially for such a small indie game. The story is pretty generic but stands out thanks to its humor. The characters, dialogue, and even in-game menus such as tutorials and infoboxes are funny as hell. I can’t describe it in any other way. I was laughing out loud several times.
For example, there’s a situation where someone from your crew said something and the others think that it may be a quote from a movie. You decide if it was a coincidence or not. If you say “Nah, it was just a coincidence”, the one who said it will get sulky and leave your crew. The humour’s certainly not for everyone, but if you’re into it, you’ll love it.
Besides the story mode, there is a rogue-like mode which even has a little story. There are different scenarios to play, each with different maps, a different story, and different crew members who all have a personality and voice lines. You start out pretty basic and your goal is to survive as long as possible and unlock new things.
Every scenario is also playable in an endless survival mode. In both modes, you’ll get a high score. There is a leaderboard to measure yourself against others.
Like every game, SPiS isn’t perfect. It could use some more variations of enemies (especially bosses) and a few more guns. Dead enemies disappear after a few seconds but there are so many of them, that you sometimes can’t see anything. This will force you to look at the UI of characters to see if they took damage and such.
On some maps, you can’t have a nice overview. Walls cover parts of your defenses or characters and you need to constantly move the camera.
If you’re late into a run, the map can be cluttered with defenses and you won’t be able to click on some things. This will make it impossible to repair them if you don’t want to repair everything as there’s a “repair all” button.
All of these things are just minor. They won’t really negatively affect gameplay that much but there is room for improvement.
I’ve played many tower defense games before. Like almost all games in the genre, it’s easy to learn and hard to master. It also gets really addictive. Most generic TD games reach the “it’s more of the same, not really fun, just doing the same over and over” state after around two hours.
Don’t get me wrong, they can be fun here and there but not so in the long run. SPiS is different. Just when you think you’re approaching that state, the game will spice things up with new things to discover. And thanks to squad management, it’s quite unique in general. This definitely is a game that deserves more love, praise, and recognition overall.
2 Stupid Devs made this with much love and it shows. And not just that, it’s a REALLY great game and you won’t regret buying it if you’re into tower defense games. It’s a gem in the genre!