A year ago I posted my first review of Training Space Station, awarding it five stars. It's available in the spoiler tag below. In the year since it was released, we've seen a number of projects that altered my expectations for sandbox-style build and explore adult games. Mad Island and ECHICRA in particular stand out as notable examples of it being done right: they have sufficient amounts of content to keep the building itself entertaining, and in the case of the former, interacting systems that make what you build meaningful on the level of gameplay. When I came back to
Training Space Station, it wasn't necessarily that I expected it to clear the raised bar, but to have improved somewhat in that timeframe.
As I mentioned in my original review, the game has a solid premise for a good sandbox. You play as a robot gone rogue, with a damaged ship and the surprising goal of becoming a slaver on the galactic fringe, capturing humanoids in raids, training them as slaves, and variously adding them to your crew or selling them on the black market.
This is a game that tries to do a bunch of things, but ultimately doesn't follow through on any of them with compelling gameplay or thorough integration.
It's a slave-training sim in which your methods are limited and repetitive, and don't culminate in a slave that behaves differently as a consequence of your training. A highly-trained slave who is a perfect shot, has no inhibitions, and is endlessly lusty (on paper) is virtually indistinguishable from a green recruit picked off an Alliance shift two minutes ago. A perfectly trained slave can't really be used for anything other than resource gathering, which is done using a crafting-style system reminiscent of Minecraft. While there is some initial enjoyment in strapping the girls to machines to make them (on paper) super soldier sex fiends, and the animations are decent, the novelty doesn't last long, particularly when you realize that the most solid animation sets are frontloaded. You'd think from the brainwashing chair that you'd have animated orgasms and some variation depending on the settings used, but the majority of training tools have a short, uninspired loop that just repeats itself endlessly. All in all, it's a rather boring affair, and the inability of your slaves to actually *do* anything other than be trained means that the animations are pretty much the beginning and the end.
It's an exploration-based action game in which your best tactic is to stand perfectly still with nothing between you and your target from the furthest possible distance and click them until they're dead without them interacting with you at all, and the levels are basically linear affairs that you repeat over and over again in order to continue a "story" that frankly isn't there. Owing to the lack of NPCs doing anything, there is no emergent story. The closed level design doesn't even give you the option of forging your own narrative around your adventure. It's just go somewhere, click from as far away as possible until your enemies are dead, and repeat.
It's a base builder with a weirdly shaped ship to serve as your "palette" and limited assets to place inside. The shortage of props, low levels of interactivity with them, and rooms that are small to the point that it limits your ability to get much of any use of them makes base building mostly a chore to figure out how to efficiently organize the storage containers for the dolls that are ostensibly your servants. My initial hope that the crew stations would mean we'd at least have crew members walking around looking busy (and maybe getting up to some sexy shenanigans) were dashed.
To wrap things up, this is a game that hasn't moved on much in four years of development; it feels like a proof of concept for a number of barely-implemented systems rather than a game. While before I was able to maintain some hope that these systems would be fleshed out and expanded, that doesn't look to be in the cards. It's unfortunate, because the premise of being a space pirate growing your crew, exploring alien worlds, and using all manner of naughty devices on your captives is a pretty great pulp science fiction premise. Unfortunately, it doesn't deliver the goods.
Original 5 Star Review:
