1000 Days to Escape | review

Name: 1000 Days to Escape review

Price:
£3.99 / $4.99 on Steam
£0.59 / $0.99 On Google Play 
£0.79 / $0.99 on Apple App store

Reviewed on : Hal 850 (Laptop 1) reviewing the PC / Steam version

Review:

1000 Days to Escape is an arcade space strategy game about trying to save as much of humanity as possible from the collapse of the Earth's environment which is predicted to happen in 1000 days. It's up to you to save as many of the 7 Billion lives as possible.

To do this you have to open the galactic map and send probes to different planets to learn about the conditions on them and then load up rockets with all the resources needed to help humans survive and colonise the planet and the first lot of settlers. To fully colonise a planet you need to send the exact amount of people the planet has capacity for, send too many and accidents will happen reducing the population to the capacity.

Unless you pause the game the timer is constantly ticking down with the number of days left and a full play through takes all of about 30 minutes. The strategy comes from managing your budget of Science points as you have to buy equipment for colonising planets and things like rocket fuel and satellites to scan other planets. You do gain Science points over time normally but a lot of your science points will come as a return for colonising planets and successful rocket launches etc. You can also find ancient artefacts from previous civilisations which can either be used to give you 500 Science points immediately, 25 days more time or sold to Alien civilisations (if you've found any) for 1500 Science points but losing you 25 days of time due to the implied negotiations and deals being done to sell it. Other options can include instantly upgrading the technology you can purchase to make colonising less hospitable worlds easier. You can also gain points from scanning inhabited but non hostile worlds. 

As I say everything happens with the timer ticking down this includes loading the rockets which need fuel and the required technology to colonise the planet and the first colonists. It's quite enjoyable and a nice touch that you have to manually drag the items into the rocket and shake the humans into it like a shaker though this is where part of the arcade aspect comes in as you can't easily specify fuel amounts and the number of humans you put in. While You can remove fuel and remove humans after the fact but you generally have to try and get close by guessing how much to shake the house to add humans or how much fuel to pour. I initially this really will matter as you start off with a ship with quite a small capacity meaning anything more than 1-2 pieces of tech required to make a world hospitable will mean you'll have to launch 2-3 rockets to fully colonise a planet.

As I've mentioned a few times different planets will have different conditions on them and you'll have to send technology with the humans colonising the planet to help them survive. These items of technology can include: Temperature control systems to help deal with cold or hot planets; Gravity control systems to deal with planets with gravity that's too high or too low; atmosphere generators for planets without an atmosphere; liquid water for planets without liquid water and flora and fauna for planets without any vegetation. While atmosphere, water and Flora and Fauna are requirements that one binary things both gravity and temperature have a far larger range of possibilities which can mean you have to take multiple temperature control units or gravitational control units or wait until you get upgraded units which can deal with larger temperature or gravity differences from what is require for humans to survive.

Upgrades are where part of the games strategy comes into play. Larger rockets offer overall more capacity for everything at a singular costs. Better fuel costs slightly more but takes up less space while giving far more distance and means you can also fill the ship up faster too. Upgraded temperature controls and gravity controls each allowing you to more easily colonise more inhospitable worlds.

Part of the strategy of the game is determining what planets to colonise and when as you generally gain more points from a successful colonisation than merely scanning planets but you also want to be efficient in your use of points and resources so you don't have to waste too much time sending multiple ships to the same plant due to its distance and the resources require to make it hospitable. You also can see no return on your points if you end up finding a planet inhabited by a hostile alien race who will shoot down your probe.

Hostile races however do offer another element of strategy to the game as you can then start a war against them to take over their planet. This requires you to normally only send an atmosphere generator and enough warriors that you have over 50% of the planets population capacity as warriors. This can be a somewhat easy way to get quite easy to colonise planets if you win and winning the war will get you access to almost guaranteed technology upgrades to help you colonise further planets so the loss of the possible around 100 points or so for the probe not scanning the planet can be recovered and more so in value because of the technology upgrades.

I guess they didn't take being left out of Michael Bay's films too well. 

One of the added twists is that you don't get the Science points just added to your account for launches and colonisations you have to leave the mission control area and go to the communications area to collect said points which means you're losing some time having to do that but you have to so you can afford to keep scanning planets and sending out more crews to colonise planets.

The game has a pretty nice stylised art aesthetic which is clear but has slightly comical elements to it such as people coming flying out of a ship if you end up putting too many in (which doesn't cost you people). The clear art style really does give the game a fairly unique look I've only seen a few times before and helps contribute to the arcadey feeling of the game.

Ok onto the issues. While the game is well made and fairly functional there are some issues. The first being the slight trial and error gameplay as while it will explain a lot it doesn't really explain (or maybe I missed it) about having to send more than 50% of the planets possible capacity of warriors to win a war against a hostile race. While the game doesn't explain that mechanic well it doesn't feel excusable because the game isn't that mechanically deep. Within about 2 hours I felt like I'd seen most of what the game had to offer and by 3 hours in I was already in the top 1,000 on the leaderboard. The Leaderboard is meant to be a way to add some degree of replayability along with the pseudo random generation of the galactic layout each time you play but it feels like the game needs something a bit more to it to either add length or add replay ability beyond hoping to get a generation that gives you a potentially better score. 

Verdict:

Giving a quite high quality feel 1000 Days to Escape feels like a game that would have come from Popcap made in its hay day before EA took over. It's stylish, fairly simple but fun to play for a while for the price.

I would say that for me I probably won't be coming back to it as I managed to eek out about 3 hours playtime with another 1 hours 30 minutes capturing pictures and making sure I wasn't missing anything major for this review so this certainly won't be lasting you a long time. It might be one you return to every so often to play a game then leave it for another while if you do come back to it, as such for the price I can't really score it highly on the time vs content scale or say there's that much drive to keep coming back as there's not much in the way of deep mechanics to learn. It's fun enough for what it is but I can't recommend it as anything other than a little distraction that while you won't feel is wasting your time it you won't come away from it feeling like you've experience something great or impactful either or developed you skills to a new level or anything.

While I haven't played the mobile version of the game I'd say if they work as well and are as well made as the PC version you might find them to be the better value options.

Composite Score:

Overall Score: