Astro
Prospector

Astro Prospector (2025) is a frantic farm-by-shooting game where you destroy a tyrannical corporation’s coffee-bean asteroids and collect the debris to grow exponentially stronger. Aiming and shooting are automatic; your job is to steer the ship towards valuable beans and power-ups, all the while dodging a storm of enemy fire. It stands out for how you use your propulsion and proximity-based mining to balance reaching safety with collecting resources to incrementally improve your spaceship.

---

You start off weak, only able to last a couple of seconds each run, and must break the Cofferoids to accumulate coffee beans. Before each attempt, you can spend these beans to receive powerful upgrades, enhancing attributes like laser damage and fuel capacity, or even adding weapons to your arsenal, such as bombs and turrets. Still, it’s inevitable that you’ll eventually run out of fuel. In this way, it’s a smash and grab every time, where you race to collect as many coffee beans as possible in the short window.

As you progress, enemies appear that bombard you with bullets, forcing precise movement to evade. Although you can shoot them, they take longer to destroy than asteroids, creating the risk-versus-reward dilemma where you can maintain focus on earning coffee beans at the cost of increased peril. Eventually, the stage’s boss appears, firing hundreds of bullets in patterns that feel impossible to avoid at first, but slowly become familiar until you can predict every trajectory.

The result is a fast-paced game of two phases: the asteroid field, where perfect movement and momentum are key, and the upgrade screen, where considered tactics shine through. The upgrade system creates a satisfying gameplay loop whereby you do slightly better each attempt until you finally conquer the level and start again at the next difficulty.

---

Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Astro Prospector 3 weeks ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 3 days ago.