I'm an "idea guy" when it comes to videogames. I see something unusual and I'm more interested in it than the vast majority of high budget games, which have to be overly familiar to make back their immense cost. Which explains why I at some point in my life decided to buy this game, which was released in 2008 but you could swear is at least a decade older by seeing it in motion.
Space Trader thinks it's a sci-fi game about being a trader, in which you'll have to travel to various planets and sell the goods you bought for a low price elsewhere, hopefully for a good profit (kinda topical), and you'll repeat this process until the end. Problem number 1: the trading makes no sense. There's no rhyme or reason to any of the goods getting higher or lower in price, so pretty quickly you smarten up to the fact that you want to just buy which ever the most costly thing is while also being the one that's trending the lowest, because chances are that even if the price doesn't go up that much by the time you travel elsewhere you will still make a solid 2-3-4-5 million in profits. So essentially risking anything is useless, since you're much more likely to be screwed by the RNG.
Problem 2: there's nothing meaningful to spend money on. They must have realized this, so this game takes a nonsensical arcadey approach: for every chapter (or "challenges" as the game calls them. Doesn't make any sense to me either) you'll have a time limit, in which you'll usually have to either have X amount of money which you'll have to make in the least travels possible, or you'll have to figure out which specific turn of events the game wants you to trigger, which is as exciting as you can imagine.
I wish that's all there was to the gameplay, but someone on the development team decided to add an FPS component to it, which I can imagine was developed by people whose entire experience with FPS games was watching Quake 3 for 5 minutes and winging it. Everything in here truly feels awful, doesn't help that they made about 4 maps in total which you will see a number of times (including Challenge 4, which is made up of three fights in the same map with slightly more enemies each time in a row, glad they included that myself).
So that about describes Space Trader: Merchant Marine. It's a game with a good idea, zero budget (as the suspiciously 2000s public domain-sounding soundtrack will prove, on top of everything else) and about the worst possible execution of that idea possible. It's an awful game, but considering it's about 6 hours long and I must've spent $1 for it, I can't be too upset at it. If anything, its attempts at doing anything are adorable.
Space Trader thinks it's a sci-fi game about being a trader, in which you'll have to travel to various planets and sell the goods you bought for a low price elsewhere, hopefully for a good profit (kinda topical), and you'll repeat this process until the end. Problem number 1: the trading makes no sense. There's no rhyme or reason to any of the goods getting higher or lower in price, so pretty quickly you smarten up to the fact that you want to just buy which ever the most costly thing is while also being the one that's trending the lowest, because chances are that even if the price doesn't go up that much by the time you travel elsewhere you will still make a solid 2-3-4-5 million in profits. So essentially risking anything is useless, since you're much more likely to be screwed by the RNG.
Problem 2: there's nothing meaningful to spend money on. They must have realized this, so this game takes a nonsensical arcadey approach: for every chapter (or "challenges" as the game calls them. Doesn't make any sense to me either) you'll have a time limit, in which you'll usually have to either have X amount of money which you'll have to make in the least travels possible, or you'll have to figure out which specific turn of events the game wants you to trigger, which is as exciting as you can imagine.
I wish that's all there was to the gameplay, but someone on the development team decided to add an FPS component to it, which I can imagine was developed by people whose entire experience with FPS games was watching Quake 3 for 5 minutes and winging it. Everything in here truly feels awful, doesn't help that they made about 4 maps in total which you will see a number of times (including Challenge 4, which is made up of three fights in the same map with slightly more enemies each time in a row, glad they included that myself).
So that about describes Space Trader: Merchant Marine. It's a game with a good idea, zero budget (as the suspiciously 2000s public domain-sounding soundtrack will prove, on top of everything else) and about the worst possible execution of that idea possible. It's an awful game, but considering it's about 6 hours long and I must've spent $1 for it, I can't be too upset at it. If anything, its attempts at doing anything are adorable.