Reviews

In-between all the casual puzzlers, shovel-ware and decent first party exclusives, every so often the DS gets itself some pretty hardcore titles, capable of draining the device's battery clean as you plough through it. Infinite Space is one such title - you won't be seeing any adverts for this one telling thirty-something that if they liked Professor Layton, they'll like this. What we have here is several hours of RPG grinding and battling in the stars.

The main hero of the game is Yuri, who has often dreamed of heading out into space. With wavy white hair and skin-tight clothing, pixel pervs will likely think that Yuri is quite a cute little chick - until they realise, of course, that he's a dude. The androgynous lead's life goal is hampered by an outright ban on space travel from his home planet of Ropesk, enforced by the evil Demid Panfilov to prevent people from fleeing his rule.

Not dissuaded by this, Yuri calls out for a launcher - someone who takes others into space for a fee. This brings him into contact with Nia Lochlain, a well-travelled, somewhat sarcastic and (naturally, given the anime-style of the game) big breasted individual who assists Yuri in breaking the rules of his planet. Thus, the adventure begins.

It soon emerges that part of the reasoning behind Yuri's desire to travel the stars is to solve the riddle of the Epitaph that his late father left to his. This mysterious cube provokes interest from several sources, both good and bad, and proves to be the key to widening the range of your travel through the different planets. As you progress through the game's chapters, more and more systems will become available to you via void gates, but in order to get anywhere, you'll need to build up quite a powerful fleet.

The actual game-play itself consists of a series of simple elements. To progress the story, you must visit the various planets within a system, talking to anyone that you come into contact with. Some will give you information related to your quest, others will set you tasks that you can then complete in order to earn additional credits. Having money is particularly important, because in order to succeed in the combat portions of the game, you'll need to build up a fleet of space-ships and equip them with crew and facilities to ensure that they remain useful to you in battle. To build a ship, first you must purchase the blueprints for it, and then pay the large costs to have it built.

Once you've got a new ship built, you'll need to give it a crew and even add extra facilities, all of which again will cost you. In addition to that, while some crew members will come to you as a result of story progression, others that you can hire at a cost will not be interested in coming to work for you until you've built up a reputation for yourself. To do this, you'll need to enter into and win several battles.

Combat itself is entirely restricted to the skies, and will occur randomly as you travel between planets. When confronted by enemies, you can choose to fight or flee, with the latter option sometimes the better one depending on the number and power of the opposing force. When in battle, you can move your ship forwards and backwards in order to stay in or get out of the range of the opposition, while also selecting your battle plan. The number of battle options you have available to you increase over time, starting out initially with simple Barrage and Normal attack functions, and the added ability to dodge. Use of these options is restricted by your battle meter, which depletes when you select your plan of attack. Earning victories will help Yuri and other crew members level up, and also increase your fame. However, defeat in battle means Game Over, so it's always important to make sure you've saved your game before you head out to the skies.

As mentioned, more advanced battling options will be unlocked as you progress, including the ability to enter into melee combat. This occurs if you get close enough to an enemy ship to board it, and will then see the crews of both sides duke it out until only one side is left standing. Again, it still boils down to tapping the required attack that you wish to use, and even the game's manual admits that success in this type of battle is determined by Rock-Paper-Scissors style rules.

While many of the early random battles you encounter will result in easy victories, you'll occasionally come across some more gruelling opposition, which is why using the Escape option before a fight is sometimes a sensible idea, especially as once a battle has begun you then cannot run away from it. It certainly pays to spend a bit of time travelling back and forth between planets in the early going, grinding your way through some of the easier fights in order to level yourself up somewhat. Meanwhile, if there are two of you present, each with a DS and a copy of the game, you can hook up via the Battle Sim option in order to practice your skills in the skies.

As you might expect from this genre, you need to be prepared to do a fair amount of reading, as there's an awful lot dialogue to get through. The title promises over 100 characters to interact with, and you'll often have to speak with people multiple times in order to get all of the information that they're willing to divulge from them. This basically means a whole lot of screen tapping to scroll through the talking head text. What makes for a rather useful helping hand from the developer, however, is that the key dialogue appears in yellow rather than white. This will help skim readers identify the areas that they specifically need to pay attention to.

One mild annoyance for myself, and it's a complaint that I've levelled at other DS games in the past is the wasted space that occurs at times. There will be multiple occasions where all that fills the top screen is simply a picture of Yuri's face. Admittedly, this is normally during the game's cut-scenes, when your attention should be focused on what's happening down below, but you can't help but feel there could be a better way of doing things than just sticking a dull, static image up the top.

Meanwhile, on the audio front, the sound effects are somewhat hampered by the tinny quality of the speakers on the DSi, but this shouldn't be enough to dampen your enjoyment. None of the actual dialogue is spoken, it's kept solely to on-screen text - even during the cut-scenes, where much of the imagery is also static and reused on multiple occasions.

As mentioned, Infinite Space is definitely not the sort of game for the user-base that Nintendo markets to. This is one for grinders, people willing to spend hours sifting through dialogue, undertaking repetitive, sometimes frustrating battles, and levelling up constantly in order to stand a chance of success. Whether it gets buried under another sea of mindless puzzle games and soulless kiddy adventures remains to be seen, but as a challenging and lengthy title, Infinite Space deserves better than that.