The Steam Fall Sale is a long awaited holiday for PC gamers. Thousands of titles are 25, 75, or 95 percent off. I was browsing through available games a couple months ago over the break, hoping to find a game I wanted on Steam. There I found Edge of Space, a 2-D sandbox adventure game. It was inspired by Terraria, another 2-D sandbox adventure game that I really enjoyed. When I saw Edge of Space, my first thought was: What could be better than Terraria in SPACE!?! Actually, a lot of things could.

When you first open the game, you will think : How could a game with music like this be bad? That’s one of the few good things about it. It then makes you create your character, create a world, suffer through a seven minute loading screen, and then dumps you in some floating hallway to begin the tutorial. You learn the controls and are thrown out into a cold and uncaring planet. Unlike the title screen, the music here is more reminiscent of African tribal drums. You have no idea what to do at first, and unlike Terraria, it doesn’t have NPCs to give you advice. You’re on your own.

I jumped off the floating rock I spawned on and landed on the ground. The developers couldn’t be bothered to make the enemies spawn off screen. Instead they have appear out of nowhere, right in front of you every time you take a couple of steps. As you expect, I was immediately swarmed by twenty jellyfish-esque things . They didn’t hurt you, but instead drained your energy. Your energy allows you to use your jetpack which helps you get around easier. Without it, you can jump an amazing two blocks. Your only method of defense is a inadequate laser gun that you received in the tutorial. It only has ten shots, which half the time will miss. Without any ammo, your going to have to mine for minerals to craft more. This is impossible to do while your being swarmed. I decided to stop playing for the day right there.

I turned it on again the next day. The same events repeated and I was once again being swarmed. I eventually found out that you could use your mining laser as a weapon, so I was able to get rid of some of the enemies – until I found they instantly respawn right in front of you and go back to chasing you. I was so frustrated with this game, I just jumped off a cliff. When you die, a message pops up saying that you died. It gives you two options : Bound 10 rods distance or Master 10 rods. Neither of these made any sense at all to me, so I just clicked on the first. It sent me back to the starting point.

I think that there’s some story in all of this, but the game only hints at it with an obscure opening cutscene with a ship, a couple of shadowy figures, and a planet.

Now I’ll talk about the good things. One thing I like that is different than other games like this is the crafting system. In order to create an item, you don’t need a certain thing. Instead you need one thing from a group of items, like metals, or rocks. Some materials are more effective in certain recipes than others, but the game doesn’t tell you that. You have to experiment until you discover it for yourself.

Unfortunately, there’s not much more I can say about the good aspects. There’s a lot of little things in this game that bug me. One example is in the inventory screen. When you want to move an item into the hotbar, you can just drag it over there. You have to click on a little tab in the hotbar, scroll through all the items you have, and then click on the one you want to move. It so tedious! Even worse there are no hotkeys to select your items! You have to scroll through them using Q and E.

Final Thought:
This game is still in beta stage, and it should be for a long time. It has very few redeeming qualities. I would not recommend you buy this game until it gets an update that makes it more playable. My rating for this game is a 3/10.

I found myself buried with homework last weekend as usual, but somehow I managed to scrape together a couple hours of free time. I went this bookstore which has this game area in the back corner. I usually never find anything worthwhile there, as the shelves are usually filled with games like “Nancy Drew Hidden Object Adventures”. I ended up being lucky that day, as I found something that looked actually good, believe it or not. It was a sci-fi strategy game titled “Sword of the Stars”. I am now going to review it.

Before I go any further, I want to make something clear. This game is hard, and for one specific reason. It offers you little to no instruction on just what you are supposed to be doing. It drops you off in the first mission without any tutorial or anything. I was forced to read someone’s beginner’s guide on the internet. I dislike doing this, as I classify looking information up on the internet as cheating. But here, it seems necessary.

That aside, let’s get into the gameplay. The main goal in each mission differs in each one. The first one is to force all of your opponents forces out of the surrounding star systems. To do this, you will need to construct different ships and send them to attack your opponent’s. You will also need to research new technology to upgrade them to become more powerful. You can try to communicate with the other players to ask them for help, bribe them, or attempt (unsuccessfully of course) to intimidate them.

Now I’m going to cover some of the story, which there’s not a lot of. The year is 2405, and mankind has discovered subspace travel, which allows faster than light movement for spaceships. You’re playing as SolSpace, a major company on Earth that helped develop this technology. A couple people aren’t too happy about one major company controlling a lot, so they form the Frontier Alliance, a rebel organization. So now you have to try to get them back in line. Unfortunately, a couple alien races have taken notice to this, and will try to exploit the divided human race.

So that’s pretty much the just of it. I would recommend this game for anyone who enjoys turn-based strategy games, as long as they don’t mind some difficulty learning the game. My rating for this game is a 7.5/10.