Star Nomad (PC) Review

Developed and published by Huy Phan, Star Nomad is, honestly, one of the most boring games around. Take on the exciting role of a space trader! Spend hours flying along the same route! Master combat in a matter of minutes because it's largely automated, only to have it not matter because of a terrible friend vs. foe combat system that can waste hours of hard-earned credits for no reason! What could possibly go wrong?

Star Nomad is a fairly simple game to understand. Taking on the role of a small trade-ship operator, the player is tasked with trying to earn credits to upgrade their ship while progressing through a story to recover their memories. The gameplay is basic and clearly designed for use on a touch screen. Tap to move the ship about to reach the various ports, tap on the items in the inventory to buy/sell, tap to activate abilities, and so on and so forth. Learning the game isn't that hard at all.

The real problem of the game is that It won't take long to figure out a route between two planets that give a good return on credits. When such a route is found, though, gamers will end up repeating it for hours upon hours because the routes yield so little cash in comparison to the expensive weaponry and ship upgrades. With weaponry and ship upgrades for combat that simply are not enough to compare with the sheer random chance of being caught in crossfire and getting blown up before there is any chance to escape or even properly defend against the barrage of laser cannons and missiles, it leads to frustrations that shouldn't exist.

To make it worse, since there are no saves, dying even once can result in hours' worth of setbacks fiscally, having to potentially buy new ships and weapons only to lose it all again in yet another bout of crossfire for the exact same reason. However, dying at the hands of 'allied' fire is infinitely more likely than death to the many pirates in the game which are, comparatively, easy to beat. The result is a title that involves flying back and forth for several hours on end, likely putting on a movie on another computer, easily defeating whatever pirates appear, before losing it all because the computer decided to get nasty.