Unlike the average RPG, Space Pirates and Zombies encourages you to freely reconfigure your ships as you play. What's more, you're always bringing multiple ships into a battle. This is a game about your tiny ragtag fleet. As you pick your way across the galaxy, taking on different missions or just making a beeline through warpgates to some distant point, you can mix it up. Try different weapons. Try different loadouts. Try different ships. Just because you have a huge pokey cruiser loaded with heavy weapons, you'll still need to fly one of the tiny mining ships on some missions. There are no dead-ends here. What's more, this isn't a game in which you save and reload. You might have to grind some mining to recover from a crushing defeat. I can't deny that I've alt-tabbed out of the game while my ships automatically mine ore in a friendly asteroid belt for a while. I don't need to be there for that. Privileges of management, and all that. Even when you're losing, Space Pirates and Zombies has a wonderful sense of momentum, advancement, progression, and variety.

The galaxy itself seems pretty typical at first, consisting of discrete areas grouped into systems, strung together into a web of warp connections. But here you'll discover an economy based on the actual gameplay, and not some sci-fi folderol. Most space trading games set up a contrived exchange of fictional goods. You buy hydroponic food from the agricultural colony and sell it to the mining station, spending the profit to buy dilithium crystal, which you'll take to the manufacturing station where you'll buy warp cores to sell back to the agricultural colony for more hydroponic food. Repeat until you can afford the level 2 laser cannons.

Not so in Space Pirates and Zombies. The economy ties into the combat, which ties into the exploration, which ties into how you level up your "character". In fact, you can level up by simply trading. Experience points, called data, are one of the three interrelated commodities. Here is a game that manages the difficult task of making trading nearly as meaningful as combat.

Considering that developer MinMax Games consists of two people, you'd expect a game with spartan production values. You will be disappointed. This is a flat-out gorgeous world, drawn with imaginative artwork, gratifyingly chaotic exploding bits, and a rich audio design.

And finally, it's worth noting that this is a game that gets zombie mythology. I'll let you discover that part on your own, as befits any apocalypse. But suffice to say Space Pirates and Zombies isn't just a grand open-world space action RPG in the tradition of Star Control. It's also a rare expression of zombies that belongs alongside Dead Rising and Atom Zombie Smasher.

Tom Chick, aside from being a regular contributor to GameShark and countless other game sites, owns and operates the popular website Quarter to Three.com

Space Pirates and Zombies is available at http://spacepiratesandzombies.com/buyGame.html