The game can be roughly divided into two sections: construction and exploration. To sustain your colony you need to generate revenue by manufacturing goods, attracting tourists, and exporting items.
Epic Astro Story screenshots
In order to do these things you’ll need to create an effective cityscape, with roads linking all of your buildings and domiciles to house your burgeoning population.
The away missions are handled very smartly by a little bar across the bottom of the screen, which takes up very little real estate but makes you feel involved with what is going on. As the team encounters question marks, they will experience events, which can be good (finding money) or bad (finding monsters). If you do find monsters, you'll go into a battle mode. You can actually get a peek at your enemies and their hot points before you start a battle, and it allows you to equip your team accordingly and choose their placement on the field before a battle. Once it starts, it's all automatic, but the battles are quick and a great way to earn both money and research points.
Pretty soon, you’ll run out of usable space. That’s when the exploration component comes into play: by assembling an Away Team (a neat reference to Star Trek) you can gain access to unexplored regions that not only throw up monetary rewards but also grant additional space in which to expand your colony.
Of course, you can’t completely overrun the planet without facing at least a little resistance. Your Away Team will often come under attack from malevolent forces, so you’ll need to arm them with weapons and clad them in armour.
If you thought you had a lot to manage in previous Kairosoft games, you have even more now. In addition to building on your land, positioning landscaping for maximum benefit, and keeping an eye on your residents, you'll also choose when the away team explores new territory and invite people from other planets to come live on yours. Tourists will fly in and out of your Space Port and attempt to make peace with your people. You'll meet aliens in ships. It's a lot to manage, but it doesn't feel over the top or stressful.
Epic Astro Story pulls together the very best qualities of Kairosoft’s output: it’s painfully addictive, surprisingly deep, thoroughly rewarding, and boasts a pixel-heavy retro look that's both appealing and archaic at the same time.
The newcomers should steel themselves for one of the most compelling mobile games of recent times.
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