This Deathwar is no good, we need a new one

There are specific tastes, there are guilty pleasures, and then there are games like 3030 Deathwar Redux that - despite tapping into some of my most primal video game interests - I just can't recommend.

3030 Deathwar Redux is a top-down space-trading simulator, where you pick up missions at a spaceport, buy and sell space cargo, hunt space pirate bounties, buy ship upgrades, buy a bigger ship... et cetera. It's a familiar formula but a difficult one to get right. And while some of Deathwar's gameplay loops are total write-offs (asteroid mining is pointless, as is the barely-playable salvaging mechanic), enough of it does work to make space-truckin' around this galaxy feel pretty great.

At first.

Deathwar's main story is pretty stupid from the beginning, and its dialog is poorly-written, but it does the job of tutorializing and guiding you through the game's core concepts. Optional side-missions picked up from spaceport NPCs offer some opportunities to explore at your own pace, too. And then, once you upgrade to a "split drive" (hyperspace-capable) ship and leave the starter system... scripted side-missions are over.

Story missions steadily degrade in quality as the game marches on, and by the end it's clear that the developers really wanted to wrap it up: dialog cutscenes get replaced with text pop-ups, mission objectives fail to explain their relevancy, some story questions even resolve themselves with no player action. And some later missions make unfortunate use of a very-poorly-implemented on-foot mechanic, which is barely interactive and takes forever because the walking speed is so damn slow.

Meanwhile, you still need to make money for ship upgrades, by grinding through randomly-generated jobs like delivering packages or passengers; there isn't much variety to these job types, and many of them just aren't worth the trouble (requiring you to go to a distant system, then another, before you get paid... ugh).

There is a baffling limit on how many jobs you can accept at once (four), and even more bafflingly, you can't save the game while jobs are in-progress. Which, if you're playing this kind of game correctly, is almost all the time! That one smells more like a save-state bug than a design decision.

Inter-system travel is more frustrating than it needs to be due to dense nebulas, which zap your fuel and can even damage your ship. Initially I thought nebulas were going to be a progress gate, and I'd eventually find an upgrade to power through them - or at least some maps to show the secret routes between dense clouds - but... nope.

And the injury added to that space-travel insult is the in-game radio, which has some legitimately cool music, but shuffles multiple conflicting genres into one playlist and starts a new track every time you dock or un-dock. Like, one moment you'll be listening to a Japanese cover of Take On Me, and then that'll get interrupted by low-fi chiptunes, only for that to get interrupted by classical opera.

It ultimately feels like a mercy that there's no substantial endgame -- I guess you could keep grinding missions to get the money for a capital ship, but... why? Medium-sized ships have more than enough capacity and speed to keep up with late-game missions, and the most expensive weapons are no better than alternatives at a fraction of the price. And other than bigger ships, there aren't any new goals to aim for once the story is over.

I'm not even going to get into the game's control and UI bugs, except to note that they make the already-unhelpful autopilot upgrade pretty damn broken.

3030 Deathwar Redux starts strong, with a promising variety of activities and some fresh new ideas for the genre; props to the early game for giving me a good dose of space-trading action. But by the time the credits rolled, all I could see in Deathwar was disappointment.

Better than: Space Run
Not as good as: Rebel Galaxy
And...: I don't know that they're even playable, anymore, but also not as good as Escape Velocity or Escape Velocity Nova

Progress: Finished the story in a heavily-upgraded Lochu.