Space Pirates And Zombie is a space strategy game about forming factions, upgrading your ship, fighting and conquering sectors while managing a zombie threat. I remembered having fun with the first game, so I went into this one wondering how it would go. I was overall pleasantly surprised, with the move to 3D being more or less only aesthetic and the core loop of the game still being pretty fun, but I had some issues with progression, both of your ship and of the story, so I didn’t stay with it until the end.
The core of the game is pretty solid, after the events of the first SPAZ, you start your own faction and try to take control of your own section of the universe, alongside your rag tag team of space weirdos, but at some point zombies come back so you have to fight them. The game is plenty generous with its tutorials and most of the part that I really enjoyed had clear goals and objectives. At some point the game just wants you to “win the war”, and this is where I lost interest because I just fought and fought and conquered territories and defended them and tried to get stronger and it was never clear if I was closer to winning the war.
The game has some light resources management; you have scrap, goons and Rez, all are used for different things like moving your ship or helping with repairs, but they can all be traded at one of the various locations on the map. It never was much of an issue and I often had too much stuff. You equip your shield with various weapons, wings, engines and cockpits in a very weird physics-based building mode that might have worked better as a static menu, but this gives it a certain feel for sure. I found it extremely hard to upgrade my ship because there are so many stats, both offensive and defensive, and you have so many options, I tried to look for the biggest overall “Threat” increase, but that didn’t feel great. You also have smaller ships flying around you and you can customize those as well.
The battle system started very hectic for me, because you both had to move and shoot, you also can manage shields, boosts and select targets. At some point I just turned on automatic firing and that helped with that quite a bit; I just had to get into range and move appropriately and the ship would do the rest of the job itself. This is good, because battles can be a bit of a mess, so having less to think about besides moving and shielding was a nice option. The game is also very generous with the game overs; If you get defeated in battle there is usually a save you can load that will allow you to get away from danger, so even if I did die a few times, I never really lost progress.
One of the big tenants of the game is that you are not special and that the whole universe is simulated, with factions and characters moving around, forming alliances, getting stronger all while you do so. In theory this is really cool, in practice it didn’t matter much, seeing NPC ships moving around for a reason is almost impossible to differentiate than seeing them move randomly. At no point did I stop and look at a NPC and go “Oh, nice, I know why this NPC has a low opinion of my faction”. Getting people to ask you if they can join is fine, but I ultimately didn’t feel like it was that simulated.
Overall I had a good time with SPAZ 2! The humor is okay and if the progression could’ve kept me engaged I would’ve kept playing a bit more, but I was ultimately stuck in a loop of fighting that didn’t seem to have an end. If you enjoy space shooters or space strategy games, it’s a fun one!
