![]() ![]() Affordable Space Adventures has no such maestro moment. Those are fine building blocks for individual puzzles, but the greatest games in the genre spend their running times building you to insane, mind-bending solutions you wouldn’t have thought of unless you’d spent the whole journey learning to think on their terms. You’ll close your heat vents and rush past an enemy before your engines go up in flames. You’ll tow a handful of boxes by deploying the sticky landing gear. You’ll swap between engines to mask your heat or EMF or sound signatures a few times. That’s a big problem for any puzzler, and an even bigger one here because Affordable Space Adventures never fully figures out how to incorporate more than a handful of its tricks into any one solution. There’s little room for creative solutions, and any difficulty that crops up in the later levels usually come down to performing the complex series of steps necessary to triumph, not in actually figuring out what to do. Most of the time, solving Affordable Space Adventures’ puzzles on your own feels like a predictable and fairly proscriptive mix-and-match of the ship’s gear. If anything, the opposite is too often true. It’s a lot to handle at once, but the design is so ingeniously tied to the Wii U’s strengths that it’s never overwhelming. ![]() You use the touchscreen to toggle various systems on and off, the left thumbstick to fly around, and the right one to aim your flashlight-a crucial tool, both in navigating the frequently near-pitch-black environments, and in scanning relics to see what their sensors are looking for. If you’re flying solo, everything is mapped to the Wii U’s GamePad. Making your way through each level is a matter of using all the toys at your disposal to overcome obstacles and sneak past alien relics, which are closer to shoot-first, ask-questions-later robots than their passive name implies. Though lacking in any offensive capabilities, your ship has two engines (one gas, one electric) and a multitude of subsystems to micromanage, all ripped from the best science-fiction clichés. See, no matter how many people are involved, Affordable Space Adventures always tasks you with escorting a single tiny spaceship through hostile alien environments. ![]() The Wii U–exclusive puzzle game, built as a collaboration between Danish studio KnapNok games and Swedish freeware legend Nifflas, technically supports anywhere from one to three players, but it’s such a drastically different and more enjoyable experience with one or two partners by your side that the single-player support almost feels like an afterthought.Īllow me to explain. Affordable Space Adventures’ biggest mistake is that it lets you play alone. ![]()
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