Spaceplan is a strange but interesting story-based idle game that uses idle gameplay only as a story conduit where you are in a spaceship and need to figure out what happened to the universe by using the power of potatoes. Starting with small solar panels and ending with massive canons shooting energy-creating drones down at planets, I found the actual act of playing the game took too long and that it wasn’t super fun idle mechanics. Otherwise I was pretty curious where the story could go so that kept me going, but ultimately the ending also left me unsatisfied.
From the get go, the idle mechanics are pretty dire, you need for a while, to tap a small square on your device in order to produce the starting energy you need (and it keeps being useful for the whole game because it acts as a multiplier) but that square is so awkwardly placed and is very small. I wish it took a larger space on the screen. It could’ve even been the whole center of my iPad! By tapping a few times, you get enough watts to buy potatoes, which passively produce watts. You use these watts to buy better structures that produce even more watts and some have interesting mechanics, like spuds that fall from your ship and generate more watts while they fall down. You also can buy upgrades to make your structures generate watts faster, and speed them up.
The real use of these upgrades is to progress through the story. You need a bunch of watts to get these and it takes a while to get them. Like most idle games, you buy a few upgrades and come back later to rinse and repeat that process until you get the next big milestone, but here this feels a bit counterproductive because you want to see the next story bit. At the same time, if the game didn’t use these mechanics it would be much shorter and they would probably wouldn’t make sense at all. I got to the end in a few days and while some of the twists made me chuckle, the actual ending was a bit of a letdown.
Ultimately, I don’t have much more to say about it, I loved the concept and the setting this game uses is interesting even if I feel that the gameplay doesn’t match what it’s trying to do. Try it out for yourself if you want to see where it goes!
