Review by: Brandon "Head Chef" Cackowski-Schnell

Imagine I were to give you a set of car keys, explain that in a car the steering wheel is for steering, the gas makes the car go and the brake makes it stop and then expected you to pass a driver's test. At times, this is what the beginning of Infinite Space feels like, only instead of a driver's test you have to face down a fleet of pirates. Once everything clicks the space combat is thrilling and the amount of ship, fleet and crew customization is staggering, however there's a lot to overcome before that point, and much clunkiness to deal with throughout the entire game, meaning many space-farers may call it quits and retire to the nearest planet.

Like most J-RPGs, the game's protagonist is a wide eyed teen dreaming of bigger and better things. Yuri wants to get off of his podunk planet, see the stars and learn the story behind the mysterious Epitaphs, a strange box left to him by his father. Thankfully for Yuri he meets Nia, a "Launcher" and she agrees to take him off planet and help him in his quest. It's not long until you have a ship, a crew, pirates bearing down on you and no earthly idea how in the hell you're supposed to save yourself.

The game seems hell bent on keeping as much important information away from you as humanly possible. Oh sure, the tutorials will show you the basics of ship combat, a simple yet engaging mix of moving your ship within range and employing the three basic moves: dodge, normal attack and barrage. Dodge moves allow you to sidestep enemy barrages with no damage but leave you open to extended damage from normal attacks. Normal attacks do less damage but can be pulled off sooner and barrage fires every weapon at your disposal three times in a deadly volley.

As your command gauge fills up you're able to pull off different moves with the most powerful moves requiring the most time to charge. What the game leaves out though are some of the more important aspects such as watching your opponent's command gauge, designated by the color of their ship, to guess if they have a dodge ready or are charging up to barrage. Gone also is advice about not just being in general firing range to pull off an attack but being in range for your particular weapons. Stuff like this is the difference between winning the game's brutal early encounters and being turned into a cloud of space dust.

When you're not fighting against space pirates, who, incidentally, appear to have been culled from some drag queen production of Tron, you'll be traveling the space highways picking up odd jobs, which brings me to the next frustration, namely the lack of any sort of quest log. As you pick up main story mission and the occasional jobs from bartenders you better hope that you either have a photographic memory or you wrote down where you're supposed to go as there's no way of knowing save returning to the planet you got the quest from and speaking to the person who gave it to you. When a section of space has a dozen planets, all with equally vowel-challenged, Eastern European names, good luck remembering which planet had the bartender that wanted the package delivered which is to say nothing of when you complete a main quest and are given no instruction as to what to do next. Many times you end up just traveling from planet to planet, and from galactic section to section hoping for some clue as to how to move the plot along.

Luckily with all of your wandering you'll come across many random battles that will allow you to add to your coffers should you win. Getting more money means you can buy module and ship blueprints which in turn means you can outfit your ship with better equipment and buy new ships to add to your fleet. The ship customization is one of the most enjoyable parts of the game and requires serious thought and trade-offs as you try to fit the various modules into your ships via a tetris style game of shape matching. Do you want one ship to be a long range bruiser that can fire from much father away and do serious damage or do you want a ship to be bristling with tech upgrades and livability upgrades that makes your command guage recharge faster and makes your crew more efficient but at the expense of firepower? Even if you have the money to buy all of the upgrades you won't have the room which forces you to make sacrifices. Luckily the game gives your a pretty good return on your investment allowing you to sell a ship and it's upgrades and use the cash to fund new purchases.

Along with upgrading your ship you can choose to assign the 100+ crew members into over thirty positions on the ship from first officer to chief navigator to head chef. Again, the game does a terrible job of explaining how to best make use of this system. For example your sister Kira is, from her statistics, best suited to be either the Head Chef or the Chief Medical officer. What she is not suited for is any command position. However, if you make her your first officer she can heal your ships in battle. Um, what? Other than experimenting with the game, there is no way to know this as the description of the crew members' various abilities are hidden in the game's help system until the game decides you need to know it, which, inconveniently enough is much, much later than you actually need to know that there's a way to heal your ships in the middle of a battle. This skill is, literally, the difference between repeatedly getting your butt handed to you by one of the early bosses and progressing through the story. Why the game would hide this information from you makes no sense.

Still though, for all the game hides from you, once it all clicks it is an extremely satisfying experience. The ship battles play out on a grand scale with mini cut scenes of your ship warming up its weapons and then unleashing a volley of death on opposing vessels. At times you can close to boarding range and take part in a rock-paper-scissors form of melee combat against the opposing crew. The game's characters all have distinct personalities and there are plenty of humorous moments within the game's massive, 60 - 80 hour story. It's a shame that the game does such a poor job of helping the player out as I doubt most folks will stick with the frustrations to get into the good stuff. If you don't mind keeping a pen, notepad and computer for forum searches nearby, give Infinte Space a try. When it clicks, it really clicks, it just makes you work to get to that point.