Space Crew: Legendary Edition is a challenging single-player strategic survival simulation game developed by Runner Duck and published by Curve Games, and is similar in concept to their previous release Bomber Crew. You play as a captain in the United Defence Force and have recruited your crew to travel through the galaxy to defeat the threat to humankind across a range of enemies.
Space Crew contains a lot of smaller improvements over Bomber Crew which makes the quality of life better. For starters, I felt the difficulty wasn’t has brutal as Bomber Crew. There are now actual customization options for the difficulty, such as the ability to make the “slow time” mode unlimited. Also, your ship now has shields, meaning not every hit inflicts permanent damage for the entire duration of the current mission.
You have a crew of 6 which need to constantly look after 8/9 stations. Not only do you need to work on your area, you will also be tasked with repairing damage in the ship, putting out fires, rescuing downed crewmates and fighting off invaders. Since you obviously cannot man all positions at once, you need to balance the amount of time each crewman spends at each station. Each station can give you benefits that might be the key to winning a fight, you do always need a pilot but definitely always need a gunner. You have the chance to customize your character to what look you feel, I like changing each of them to have a unique look so it easy for them to stand out when I am trying to manage them in my ship.
I do feel from the previous game the crew AI has been slightly upgraded and way more responsive and way easier to get them to do things. For example all you have to do is click the “fight fires” button that pops up and they will immediately go to any fire on your ship to put it out rather than having to do variety of different clicks on the fire extinguisher and then the fire.
There’s also a stow button that sends the crewman to put any piece of equipment into the nearest empty rack, again saving you the hassle of having to find an empty one to put in. Again such nice quality of life improvements I was talking about that really add up to make the game a lot more enjoyable and flow so much easier and better.
We also have a greater range of mission types. Now you aren’t just doing simple stuff like dropping bombs and taking pictures for the entire length of the campaign. There are all sorts of different tasks, from patrol and escort missions to scouting and strikes against alien motherships. There’s also a greater degree of random secondary objectives, such as finding escape pods or alien weapons technology among debris fields. I enjoy how much it lets you just explore space.
Champions also return that are more powerful and you will have to take out. There are eight of them to defeat.
Another new feature is dealing with alien boarding parties. When a boarding ship connects, your crewmen can fight them off by grabbing a rifle off an equipment rack or using pistols you can arm them with in the crew gear screen between missions. Definitely always have them to hand as you don’t want to make it too easy to kill your crew.
However every boarding action did kinda feel the same. The alien boarding ships always connects to yours in the exact same spot, and your strategy for fighting the boarders is the same every time so it was never really too difficult to fend off, especially if you have levelled up correctly. The boarding party always consists of the same couple aliens and they don’t use different types of troops or equipment so nothing changes other than the number of hits it takes to kill them.
Boarding is a one-way street. They can board you, but you can’t board them. The ability to board enemy ships or stations and try and take over could have been so fun, you could have even maybe stolen their ship and taken over the technology but I imagine that would be hard to implement, plus if the ship in an alien language how would you control it!! It’s a good thing that this time there is a much greater range of mission types in the game. While this helps to create a rewarding system of progression, unlocking new mission access as you advance through the story, it also means you are going to be doing the similar easier missions for a while until you upgrade your ship and crew enough to move on and actually stand a chance.
If you try speedrun through each missions you will find yourself getting stuck and frustrated very quickly, so personally I would say take your time and enjoy yourself doing a couple of the easier missions to begin with and learn the mechanics. Plus of course don’t forget to customize your crew to make them how you want them to look!
Conclusion
Space Crew takes a while to get into but once you do it is fun to play and definitely brings the same enjoy Bomber Crew did. They have taken what was lacking in Bomber Crew and the frustration you had and changed things around. But let me tell you this, even though they have made it so much better gameplay-wise, I think I still had more fun playing Bomber Crew which is bizarre. I am looking forward to the next concept if they do bring another title out. I heard people mention Pirate Crew but I hate boat videogames so please don’t do that!! Haha!
This game was reviewed based on Xbox One review code, using an Xbox Series S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
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