Space Marauder
Review

Space Marauder (2021) is a shooting game where you play a spaceship on the frontier of the galaxy, mining precious resources from asteroids and defeating enemies. While its unique controls are extremely simple and paired-back, they take time to master. Unusual for a shooting game, its simple 2-colour art-style and intuitive gameplay allows you to progress at your own pace, make for a relaxing yet rewarding experience.

You play an asteroid miner in a spaceship, tasked by your overseer, Ruby, with mining the myriad asteroids that populate the space around your base. You encounter dangerous mines that can detonate and destroy you, and you need to watch out for bands of hog pirates who'd like nothing more than to blast you into oblivion.

You move around using your joysticks, one for speed and one for direction. The physics system makes moving around accurately really tough and requires a lot of practice and skill. You can upgrade your lasers, which you use to shoot asteroids, mines and enemy ships, as well as get other upgrades, such as fuel capacity, health and rate of fire. If you die, you lose all the resources you were carrying and respawn back at your base. You can then go back and collect what you lost.

It's a unique modern twist on old arcade games like Asteroids, which expands on the formula with new gameplay elements and controls, but keeps the core elements that made those old games successes.

Our examiner, Ben Kendall, first checked Space Marauder (Dreams) 2 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 16 months ago.