Galactic Junkers looks like a game you’d play on your phone or tablet, and that’s exactly how it plays, for better or worse, with your mileage varying wildly on how much you enjoy a fairly repetitive gameplay loop.
First things first – the game bills itself as comedic, and that’s a dangerous claim. Humor is subjective, and in every instance, the jokes fell flat for me. I could see where they were trying to land the jokes, but they just weren’t funny, either because they were so obvious, or in more cases, were literally just not funny. Beyond that, the rather comical appearance of your captain and crew seem to be the only attempt at humor, and again…that’s going to be subjective. You have a lot of customization options, including a myriad of distinctive and/or silly accessories..but this only emphasizes the “mobile phone” feeling, where a smaller screen is aided by wacky decorative elements for easier tracking. On a computer monitor, it just makes things feel cheap and silly, and not in a good way. To their credit, the music and sound is well done, aside from the standard budget game idea of making all characters talk in bleeps and bloops. No noise at all would have been better than this option, which reminds me unfavorably of talking to a character in Animal Crossing.
The game is most likely to appeal to someone who enjoyed games like FTL, where there’s a healthy amount of micromanagement. For me personally, it was needlessly tedious. This again might be a case of a game missing its mark for me though. To its credit, the game does try to make the controls work for you, with dropdown menus often being an option, as opposed to scrolling around the map of the ship looking for a specific system or what have you. Still, your characters will sometimes do completely dumb things on their own, such as when my captain (left alone on his own ship) decided to randomly stop repairing a module and instead was operating it, leading to a cascading failure of things. There’s no reason I should have to monitor a character to make sure they’re doing the thing that I told them to do. The game is weirdly buggy. There were multiple times when my first click did nothing. It registered, but the game never responded. Characters will get hung up on scenery for no apparent reason. Responsiveness overall seemed to come and go, almost at random. It felt like a game that needed a bit more polish and bugfixes before being released. But the biggest issue I had with Galactic Junkers is this: there’s plenty of things to do, from fighting pirates to salvaging ships, to mining asteroids, yet the game somehow still manages to feel empty. None of these activities really feels fun. Sure, I can make more money and buy a better crew, or trade for a better ship, but the game itself is just lacking.
It’s also worth noting that the pricing is problematic on Steam. $16.99 USD is absolutely too much for what you’re getting here. I understand they’re trying to keep pricing comparable with the console versions of the game, but that’s not okay. On console, you can make the argument that this price range is fair. On Steam, where there’s better games, available for cheaper, I just can’t see the justification for a full price purchase. My advice here is to watch some videos of the game online. See if this one appeals to you, and make your own call, but even with that being said, don’t pay full price unless you’re REALLY certain you’re going to like it. I’m willing to give it a thumbs up because it’s not broken or a cash grab, but it’s literally a 55/45 split for me here, and it’s full of caveats as far as whether or not it’s a recommend.
CLICK HERE to purchase Galactic Junkers on Steam.
The Chuck is a lifelong gamer who was born in Ohio, but now lives in much closer proximity to Mickey Mouse.
The Chuck has found his life to be a series of improbable and almost unbelievable events, starting when he was twenty and caught the bubonic plague from a prairie dog. He was as surprised as anyone when he found out that's something that can happen.
When he isn't gaming, The Chuck can be found enjoying baseball, (American) football, pro wrestling, and horror movies. He is most commonly seen in the company of one or more cats.
Reclusive by nature, The Chuck is (like most semi-feral creatures) reward-driven. Approach with caution and some form of treat.
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