Into the Void (2015)

I kind of hesitated whether I should give this one a 6 or a 7. Ultimately I decided to go with the higher score, based purely on the fact that the game actually got me stuck in front of the screen for the past couple evenings, though in reality it should have been a 6,5. Into the Void is a space exploring turn-based strategy game. You're given a small fleet (and I really mean small, since you're limited to a maximum of six ships) and you wander around some random galaxy scavenging resources and fighting your battles. There's even some backstory to it, but it's so uninteresting that I followed it only to get the general idea. The gist of this game is to grind out enough resources during each mission to research new stuff and expand your fleet. Since there are a lot of ways to arm your fleet, it actually is quite fun. The main problem is gameplay. At some point of the campaign you will probably build a fleet that will mop the galaxy's floor with any enemy your ships come across, even at higher difficulty levels. This is when the game gets boring. Yes, the enemy ships are tougher and have more firepower with each consecutive mission, but it rarely makes any difference, if you also retrofit your fleet on regular basis (which you do, obviously). Thus in every mission you'll have around 8-10 encounters that take 2-3 minutes of your time, even though it's painfully obvious the enemy doesn't stand a chance, before you get to this one meaningful battle at the end of the mission that tests your fleet a little more comprehensively. There's barely any sense of danger, which - in short - ****. Despite of its shortcomings Into the Void is still a nice little game to spend some time with and cheap enough to simply give it a try.