Created by Copenhagen based indie studio, KnapNok Games, Affordable Space Adventures charmingly presents itself as a slick, futuristic travel agency offering to bring space exploration to the common folk, for a reasonable price. By cutting a few corners here and there, the thrifty agency known as Uexplore, are able to operate on a budget a bit smaller than that of NASA. The only problem is, customers get what they pay for.
The puzzle-centric campaign, which Creative Director Lau Korsgaard estimated at 10-15 hours, puts you in the role of pilot in a small, less-than-top-of-the-line spacecraft. Immediately after starting your journey, things predictably go awry, leaving you stranded and lost on an alien planet you must explore to find your way home. Built for cheap exploration, your craft features absolutely no offensive capabilities. Instead, in order to navigate the extremely hostile world, you must adapt. By scanning your enemies, you learn their sensitivities and must then augment your ship via its “Heads Down Display” (far cheaper than HUDs, apparently). With the Wii U’s touchscreen, you can lower your ship’s stabilizers or decrease your thruster power to dampen your electrical or heat output and thus become invisible to certain enemy types. However, with lowered stabilizers, or decreased thruster power, your ship begins to handle poorly and you risk crashing.
By dividing up the controls of the ship, the game can be played simultaneously by 1, 2 or even 3 players, leaving the engineering responsibilities to the player with the touchscreen controller while the other players use separate controllers to pilot the ship or direct the scanner and spotlight. During my demo, I played with one other person who acted as the Scotty to my Captain Kirk. After I scanned a few angry tentacle robot monsters, we discovered what alerted them to our presence. After my partner adjusted our ship accordingly, we limped past them, unseen. Very quickly after, I was screaming for more power and stabilization as we had to quickly negotiate a very narrow path between some deadly lasers.
Affordable Space Adventures takes advantage of the Wii U’s touchscreen controller in a way more Wii U games should. Furthermore, while many games simply place players alongside each other and call it co-op, KnapNok Games’ decision to forgo two separate ships and instead divide the single ship’s controls among players ensures a truer, and absolute necessary cooperative experience to succeed.
If you’ve always wanted to go on a space adventure, but it never was in your budget, check out Affordable Space Adventures when it launches in the Nintendo eShop on April 9th. There are currently no plans to port the game to any other platform, but depending on how it’s received, an eventual port is said to not be out of the question.
