Space Tyrant (PC) Preview

Despite Space Tyrant being in Early Access/Alpha state, it is fun and has a crazy addictive element to it. There is a lot going on despite how simple it is, so this will first be an explanation why a lot of this works. At its root, the player will start with a single planet and small fleet. Every turn it's possible to move one space to various types of planets. Each turn more money and research is given based on how many planets one "has," but almost every planet has to be fought for. Many things are streamlined, such as being able to buy a ship anywhere; invasions are just a dice roll and so on.

Meanwhile, each enemy planet has a lot of events going on to stop you, whether it is raising a timer to end the game, lowering income, increasing enemy fleets, and so on. They start to stack against you fast, so you have to move quickly. Combat occurs in a real-time fashion, as each ship randomly shoots at a target. It's also possible to manually activate ships once per combat for special moves, such as a new attack, or heal.

Combat occurs fast, but it is fun with its pace and how fast ships can be pulled back in. There are heavy RPG elements, such as levelling up a character that persists between levels, or finding items to equip. There are a few issues, such as events becoming a bit too repetitive with too high of an unknown factor. Another issue is a bad snowball effect of either winning super hard, or losing super hard based on how the first couple of turns work out. With some small improvement this will be pretty solid overall.