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Review: Space Station: Frontier

March 19, 2010

Overview

Space Station: Frontier is a tower defense game mixed with real time strategy. You are tasked with defending your space station from various incoming enemies. Many tools are available to help protect your space station, including power generators, laser turrets, interceptor lasers, missile launchers, and other permanent upgrades, among others. The defense of your space station also requires minerals, which need to be mined from nearby asteroids. As your base grows, your tower defenses will need to grow to protect your mining operations. OpenFeint is supported. Social score keeping, along with 3 different unlockable modes and a 15 level campaign makes the replayability very high.

Features

There are 15 levels in the campaign and 3 different modes of survival, mining, and protect that you can unlock. The campaign levels have different objectives such as mine enough minerals to hit a goal, and survive for 2 minutes. All of your extra structures will need to be connected to the space station through power nodes which are vulnerable to attack. When you begin the campaign you may only build miners and laser turrets. You gain the ability to build more structures through earning credits and purchasing new buildings in the Shipyard (accessible from the main menu). The most important building will be the power generator since your space station can only support 3 structures, buy this one first! As you build up your base with mining, offensive turrets, and support structures, you will receive warnings about incoming enemy spacecraft. The enemy space craft all have different abilities that can be countered by your various arsenal, this is where Space Station: Frontier begins to take on the feel of a tower defense game. You can upgrade your structures by selecting them then upgrading. The range of your turrets will display as a white translucent circle on the map and at full upgrade, your turrets can outrange most of the baddies.

The Good

This is a long game, you will most likely have to replay some missions and use the mining and survival modes to earn extra cash. The Shipyard where you buy your new structures is well made and has enough truly helpful upgrades to keep you playing just to try them all out. Zooming out and in is no farther than a simple touch, with a perfect maximum and minumum range. The interaction between enemy units and your defensive systems is a pleasure to watch and is fun to predict. Origin8 did a great job developing this game and supporting it with updates.

The Bad

The graphics are not amazing, at times it feels like there could be more visually to look at. The feeling of a computer game will creep in to your consciousness while playing Space Station: Frontier, with long rounds and a huge amount of unlockables, which might turn off some fans of traditional apps. The enemies, although powerful, always go straight to your space station, which makes them seem dumb at times. Zooming in and out to give you maximum control can become annoying when the action is hot and heavy.

The Verdict

Space Station: Frontier is an addicting game with a well made, time taking, computer game feel. The amount of unlockables, and an amazing monetary system will keep you coming back again and again.

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