Recently, I talked about how interesting I found the concept of using sci-fi planets as real estate in farming sims and base-building games. The universe must have heard me because shortly after my review of Farlands, Space For Sale came across my desk. Space For Sale is a galactic colonization game with a little more emphasis on the real-estate side of things, tasking you and a friend with building homes for settlers across the galaxy. While a bit bare bones in its early access state, Space For Sale certainly has promise, though it may not be everything you expect it to be.
Because it stands out so much, Space For Sale’s fantastic comedy will be the first thing you notice.
From the first cutscene to the gameplay itself, Space For Sale manages to pull off some uniquely hilarious comedy. It’s neither very dialogue-driven nor edgy or gross-out orientated (something I’ve come to expect from sci-fi games with the “weird aliens” aesthetic.) Rather, Space For Sale uses some great, simple slapstick humor, giving the whole game a sort of whacky cartoonish feeling that simply works in its favor. The absolute most hilarious thing in the game is definitely running over your own settlers with the buggy, something I promise you will be doing a lot of if you give this game a chance.
Space For Sale is less of a farming game and more of a colony simulator.
At the start of each Space For Sale game, you are to land on your procedurally generated planet (crash land, that is) and, either solo or with a friend, terraform it into a luxurious settlement for prime realtors to move into.
The game has less of a “desperate colony on the edge of space” feeling and more of a “gated community on the third moon of thraxia” vibe. While there are some dangerous alien wildlife to contend with on these strange worlds, your settlers are never at risk of starving to death, being overrun by space pirates, or other such unfortunate ends.
As such, Space For Sale feels sort of like a property management sim. You land on the planet, which is divided into several “hub” areas that serve as neighborhoods. Certain buildings, such as settler houses, need to be built within the radius of these hubs, making them primarily your settler areas and workstations.
I would say there isn’t actually a lot of resources to gather in Space For Sale. Primarily, you’re gathering Red Metal, which is then refined into all the goods you need to construct buildings. Mainly, you’re looking to construct settler homes, which as I mentioned are built around hub locations across the map. The same goods needed to build settler homes are required to build most everything in the game, at least when it comes to structures.
The gameplay loop is pretty straightforward: Gather resources to build homes, build homes to invite settlers, and then build amenities to improve your approval rating with said settlers. The idea is to turn a wild, untamed planet into that friendly gated community down the road you can’t afford to live in.
Space For Sale doesn’t have any actual farming mechanics, at least not that I could find in the game’s current state. There is no planting of resources or really a whole lot of harvesting. Instead, the game mostly tasks you with building passive production buildings, sort of like a city builder game, over resources in the wild, which then adds said resource to your collective checklist of what you need to upgrade your hubs.
The game becomes about adding the correct number of resource nodes to your planetary total to upgrade your hubs. You can build a drill over some rocks to unlock a point in ore, build a water park over hot springs to gain extra approval, etc. It feels a lot like a city-builder game but without the production or loss of these resources outside of Red Metal, which you use to construct all of these buildings.
Everything being tied to a node almost means that there is no destruction or cultivation of the environment. Besides breaking the occasional Red Metal node, nearly everything is not removed or planted but constructed on top of it, making all of the game’s resources sort of a static presence on the map you interact with.
Everything in the game that can be constructed is done so in a specifically designated spot, which takes away a lot of the game’s freedom and the fun of building these little colonies. With very little to do in the way of decoration or cultivation, it starts to quickly feel less like a building game and more like a very low-risk economy simulator where you simply gather certain numbers to watch the other numbers go up.
What the game does have going for it, though, is exploration, which is intrinsically tied to player progression and thus encouraged. In order to unlock crafting recipes and buildings, players have to physically explore the planet and scan new alien lifeforms and geography to learn how to harness them. There is nothing in this game more fun than driving around in your buggy and seeing all the strange new locations, though I wish there wasn’t a sudden and jarring change in the lighting when you entered a new region.
All in all, I think Space For Sale is an interesting title, albeit not quite what I expected. If you’re into the idea of building towns on the galactic frontier with friends, this game may be for you, although you might find certain early access features to be wanting. If, however, you wanted to open up a farm and physically terraform an alien planet, Space For Sale will unfortunately leave you wanting, though we may see a shift in that direction as the game sees further development.
Pros:
- Great slapstick humor and appealing graphics
- Interesting world design
- Solid mechanics, though more city builder than farming sim
Cons:
- A lack of interaction with the environment beyond exploration
- A quickly repetitive gameplay loop, currently lacking in a lot of depth or things to do
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