jmcl: Well, there are many voices saying "Redshirt" is overpriced - it may seem so but after beating it I have to disagree.

The idea to build a social network simulator with RPG skills system and some strategic elements is very good one, no surprise here. Adding "Star Trek"-themed elements in a style of "Space Quest" game is also an excellent one.

Unfortunately implementing "Space Quest"/"Facebook" cross is very hard if you are, well, far from being a "trekkie" yourself - too much "Face", too low on "Space". If you look closely to the premises and read a lot of background text in the game - you'll see a few good "Star Trek" (but mostly in "Space Quest" interpretation) jokes which is good but, well, repeating them over and over and over again kills it even for those who get it.

The creators tried very hard to draw as many different faces and races as they could, making use of procedural/random generation algorithms: every character in the game have their own portrait which requires a lot of work. Let's mention there a fully-customized player character, complete with different "sad" or "happy" face and posture, "sick" or "healthy" axis - lots and lots of individual pictures.

To make it an easier task, the non-player character portraits use the same pose. To sum up, a tiny 100x100 thumbnail, the same pose, five (or so) different races, two or three genders, three or four hair styles, maybe a different shirt, many different colours for different elements. Diversity is good but it's really hard to locate a unit you need, especially as the developers wouldn't bother to check their algorithm thoroughly: twice in quite a long game I had two different characters with the same name (and luckily different race) in my "friend list", and once there was an "away mission" with THREE namesakes! Thanks random god, all three have died on the mission and didn't add me on "Spacebook" afterwards.

In all, the developers did thought of diversity but failed to personalize the units. If we are talking about "StarCraft" with throngs of identical Space Marines it's okay but for social network simulation - COME ON, SRSLY?!

Another thing the developers failed at is that the player have no incentive to read the enormous amount of text they've written. The game is long and, well, rather boring. You have very little of "Spacebook Actions" to perform daily: in the beginning this is enough, in the mid-game it's hard to manage them but most of the time there is not enough credits to purchase extra actions when you need them, and in the end it's no point to do this so you just EAT to restore health or PARTY to restore happiness, depending on what your job is deducting from your stats, plus an occasional "Spacebook like" to raise your rank. In the beginning you read many pieces of text and occasionally smile at jokes you find, in the midgame you need to perform numerous actions and have no time to read, and in the end you try to read occasionally but find nothing new, just repetitions.

As a consequence you just stop paying attention to anything except the stats updates. When you are writing a message - it is the same as with background text: in the beginning you try different combinations to make it sound good, then you discover that there are just three kinds of messages you can send (meaningless, romantic or insulting), and the rest makes no significant difference - so you just choose a favorite set of lines for either case, and done.

To sum up, most of the price tag comes from effort the developers spent on drawing things nobody pays attention to, writing texts nobody actually reads, and developing stats nobody actually understands.

The best game to compare this one to is, imho, "Space Rangers"/"Space Rangers 2". For those who played these titles - imagine a really long and boring "planetary prison quest", complete with fixed schedule, random occurences and a time counter. Same here, except it's too long and your actions mean next to nothing - you can't influence away missions, you have no option to get out before your time, and instead of three meaningful choices each time you are presented with fifty equally meaningless ones.

I'd seriously recommend the developers to look at "Space Rangers" to see how the things are done. "SR" has much easier and cleaner game mechanics (much fewer stats, much better effect of each of them), diverse - but still personal! - NPCs (hey, every race has its own distinctive ship/NPC names built from a set of syllables - look closely, that's how you should have done it!), and good writing (well, mostly lost in translation but still good).

Next time remember to test more also - if you use random numbers so heavily why not calculate probabilities of undesired matches and see if they are low enough? When the computers were as big as the buildings developers had to use procedural/random generation heavily because of memory limitations, and checked their algorithms by mathematics to see there would be no planet "C*NT" in their game. Now you can actually generate all the possible combinations in minutes and check them by brute force - why don't you use either?

Overpriced? It depends on how you judge: the work-time matches the price, the outcome doesn't.

PS Just have to mention the game ending - you get to a rescue shuttle with the captain and few unspecified others, and the rest of the people just dies. It's rather dystopian, isn't it? Through all the game you use lies to climb to the top of the pyramid and leave your "friends" behind when the time comes. I remember "The Feeble Files" to be scolded for framing an NPC and reporting him to the authorities, and now they just explode an entire space station! Creepy in a bad, bad way.