subject: Galaxy Life [print this page] Your home world has just been destroyed and youve been sent to distant planet to colonize and rebuild, regroup and retaliate, however, yours is not the only colony and its every Starling for themselves. Galaxy Life is a massively multiplayer online base builder/strategy game, in which you are responsible for protecting your starlings from attack and crushing any competition.
Gameplay mainly consists of building your Starling colony, youll need to place all your essential buildings for resource production as well as defense structures to protect them. As you progress youll need to upgrade your buildings in order to produce more resources, make military units stronger and eventually colonize more worlds.
Player interaction is a necessity, some items necessary for advancement are only obtainable by ransacking other colonies. This results in a lot of action, youre going to get attacked, a lot, but its not as bad as it first seems. You dont actually lose anything when youre attacked, damaged buildings will stop functioning, but any resources taken are not lost. Protecting your base is a little difficult, youll find that your turrets will be hard pressed to protect everything so sacrifices must be made.
When attacking you simply select a unit and tap on the screen to deploy. Once youve deployed a unit you have no more control over it so strategy comes from unit placement and timing. Rather than spamming all your troops in one place youll find its better if you can secure key locations first with specialized units then place regular units after.
There is a short mission system for training and to keep you occupied in the early levels of gameplay but once you decide to expand and reach out, youll find a virtual cosmos to play amongst. Interactions with friends are limited to sending them troops for defense, after a while though, troop production becomes very expensive and this feature is a little underused. There is a mail system but it needs a little work, user names are sometimes not displayed.
In app purchases are not essential for development but youre able to speed up projects and buy items for defense and offense. Anyone who has played similar titles before will be wary of high level bullies, Galaxy Life addresses this issue by only allowing you to initiate attacks on people close to or above your own level. This is fantastic as it puts an end to farming low level players.
Visually this game looks fantastic and plays easily on both iPad and iPhone. There is plenty to do here as well, even when your high level youll no doubt have a low level colony that needs more attention. Im giving Galaxy Life a 4 star rating, its addictive and there always seems to be something you want thats just out of reach to reel you back. The social elements need a little work but these are not game breaking faults. IAPs could be a little cheaper but as theyre not essential its not too big an issue. All in all a great title.
