On February 5th a random video showcasing a new game appeared on YouTube. Within minutes this spread like wildfire with the game getting its own URL, a podcast interview, and even showing up on Steam. This news is, of course, the announcement of Space Pirates and Zombies 2 by MinMax Games. MinMax is a two-man studio that just wants to make the kind of games they couldn't while working for a Triple A development studio. Their first release was SPAZ, a retro top-down space shooter inspired by the likes of Star Control, Escape Velocity, Master of Orion, and others. While at its core the game was all about the "pew pew", there were many inspired elements to the gameplay. Such as constructing and customizing the armaments of your own vessels and commanding a small squadron against waves of military, civilian, bounty hunter, and even zombie ships. You gathered Rez, a mineral like resource, to build ships. You gathered goons to crew them and you gathered research to improve your abilities (in similar fashion to the skill tree in Diablo). The game had its faults, though. Namely to get any progression done, you had to "grind" like crazy. A lot of grinding. Like grinding all day everyday. And the story could be considered very lacking in quality with no real voice overs to speak of and a very unsatisfying ending.
This brings us to SPAZ 2. After releasing the Bounty Hunters free expansion for SPAZ 1, MinMax seems to have instead focused all of their attention on SPAZ 2 for the last 16 months. The initial reveal looks very promising. Offering the same style of gameplay but in 2.5D graphics. The backgrounds are gorgeous and the physics are outstanding. Tractor-beamin' giant rocks into enemies should give many nostalgic Gravity Gun moments. The game seems to shy away from the original's ship construction and fleet building style, however. Instead you can bring your mothership directly into the fray and since these are hard times, blowing up and stealing from foes and friends alike is essential to beefing up your mothership's potential. The devs liken this to the customization found in the MechWarrior franchise. There are some single-part craft that you can have fly around with you but it's all about the modular motherships and action this time. While they can get quite ugly, I'm sure that outside of the hectic confines of "enemies attacking from every which way" you can make some truly beautiful abominations out of the parts. There's currently 70 parts to scavenge from, mostly original to SPAZ 2, but you can spot a couple from SPAZ 1 ships in the reveal video. These parts come in two flavors: the inner Core parts that form the heart of your mothership and the outer hull parts you scavenge from your enemies. The latter acts as armor and weapon batteries. The addition of banking adds the tactical flair of "do I want to expose my cores to put more guns on target?"
SPAZ 2 will feature local cooperative play and online arena type modes. One of the ideas is to put AI captains all over the universe, 200 by default. These captains count as their own faction, just like each player does. They can do everything a player can do such as wandering around, forming alliances, betraying those alliances, and gathering salvage by kicking you while you're down. It should be very interesting to see a persistent universe filled with constantly shifting power between players and NPCs. While this is just an initial announcement and no further information has been revealed, I am looking very much forward to the next Space Pirates and Zombies game. The first one was very ambitious and overall quite good. It should be absolutely great to see what MinMax can pull off with the lessons learned. What you can also expect from SPAZ 2 is a ridiculous amount of features. Like Virtual-Reality support!
Some form of playable version will be released this year. All of you should look forward to it. Check out http://www.spaz2.com/ to learn more.