What happens when an incremental game merges with a retro space shooter? You get something close to Deep Space Cache – a budget, simplistic and direct take on the “build a system that generates more and more and more”. Here, your system is mining asteroid rocks and using them to complete a giant skill tree. Fans of Nodebuster will feel right at home although the two games have distinctive feels and goals. Deep Space Cache is far less concerned about skill – it is a more relaxed affair. That brings positives and negatives into the mix though.
Starting out, like all incremental machine games, you have limited power and ability to do much. Your spaceship moves slowly, shoots slowly, and has weak damage. Your world starts bland too, with just a few asteroid rocks gently floating by. In many ways, it’s quite underwhelming initially as you get a short time span to mine an asteroid or two. Thankfully the material you pick up is immediately put to use. In between runs, you’ll spend your time on two screens. The first is a resource generator. You feed your asteroid materials into it to kickstart it into action and continue feeding it material to speed it up and make it produce more. What does it produce? A currency to upgrade (augment as it is called in the game) your mining spaceship! The second screen contains a sprawling upgrade tree that forks off into four distinct directions. These augmentations improve damage, shot speed and spread. Other secondary weapons are added and this allows you to harvest more resources from asteroids, to improve the generator of currency to augment the ship.
Deep Space Cache gets more interesting the further you play. This is because soon you’ll be able to buy a second generator which introduces a new type of asteroid. These will be tougher and require more ship augments, but the rewards are bigger. Then you’ll have a third generator, a fourth and so on. The more asteroids, the more upgrades, the more chaos and things to shoot and blow up. It has the incremental elements down perfectly and the next upgrade is always just a carrot dangle away.
The spaceship movement and controls work well for mining things but the main issue with Deep Space Cache comes from its lack of challenge. There are no enemies to speak of. You can fly into (or over) asteroids without consequence. The player is in control but ultimately it’s just getting you to the same goal the game could reach without your input if you left it alone. Deep Space Cache isn’t an idle game, but it is so simple and without challenge, it doesn’t feel too far removed from being one. This is a personal preference but I’d have preferred to have my inputs feel more valued. Reduce my runtime if I crash into an asteroid. Give me some enemies or traps to avoid. Instead, a bigger number gets bigger is the main drive here. That may be enough for some, but I felt a bit removed from the gaming experience.
Deep Space Cache picks its lane, keeps it clean and simple, and delivers a solid incremental game for 89p. Whilst I may have preferred more stakes and player input like Nodebuster provides, I can still appreciate the craft and brain-disconnection vibe this game is going for. It’ll give you around 4 hours of gameplay to reach the end of the skill tree and is longer, more well-balanced and a third of the price of its main competitor. I’d like to see an offshoot of this idea with more interaction as I think this has real potential for the future too.
Review code provided by the developer. Deep Space Cache is out now on Steam.
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