Lose yourself in space with this magnificent exploration game

If you’re worried about ever seeing Faster Than Light come out on Android, don’t worry, because its successor is already on the scene, and it’s called Out There. The goal is to guide your spaceship through the galaxy to reach your goal, exploring unknown planets to discover resources and new alien species.

A ruthless space exploration game

Out There is a game that aims to explore the infinite realm of space in search of a defined goal. Using your ship, you can move between systems and planets in search of fuel, oxygen or materials to build additional modules in your vehicle.

The game is rogue-like in its genre, with a huge randomly generated world and one particular challenge – if you go down to 0 on one of your gages (fuel, oxygen and hull), the game ends permanently. You’re then left with no choice but to start again by drawing a line under everything you’ve done. This is always frustrating, but the feeling does fade quickly when faced with the pleasure of exploring new environments, and replaying the adventure with a new start. That said, even if the random generation of the game world helps mitigate the frustration of failure, the relative lack of content (backdrops and planets tend to all quickly look the same) and the lack of variety in the tasks you have to do (too many require you to extract resources) do affect playability in the long term and make Out There less fun in terms of replayability than Faster Than Light.

The developers have, however, thought to include some quality content to lessen the repetitive aspect of Out There: the space explorations are regularly interspersed with descriptions, dialogs, and unexpected encounters, which do break the monotony of the journey while immersing you in the game, largely due to the quality of the writing. It’s nice to see a mobile game that offers interactive dialogs that challenge your intelligence, and it’s basically because of these multiple choice dialogs in alien language that you need to be an improvised interpreter!

A complex game system to master

Out There isn’t necessarily obvious at first glance. Despite a nice tutorial that holds your hand and leads you through the basics of the game, we still felt a little lost during our first forays. Fortunately, we got to grips pretty quickly with the main mechanisms that allowed us to move forward: choosing good planets to mine, focusing on building strategic modules for our ship, and optimizing our travel between planets and systems. Out There is a rich and complex game that requires you to take some time to discover it, which is a good thing for a rogue-like game where the fun in playing it is based largely on the discovery of its mechanisms.

You should realize, however, that each time you launch the game, you have the unpleasant surprise of being asked to register with Google Play Games service – it is optional, but happens persistently. It’s not a serious thing in itself, but it quickly becomes annoying after a few launches, especially since it’s not possible to disable the feature from the options menu.

A successful space opera esthetic

From the first moments of Out There, the the intricate work done by the creators in terms of the esthetic universe was obvious. Even if the management interface of the vessel favors counting and readability at the expense of esthetics, the rest is very nice and imbued with a real atmosphere. This means you’re then faced with a gigantic space opera that leans to the cold and modern esthetic used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The willingness of the developers to give Out There its own personality is noteworthy and helps to make it a landmark game in its genre.

Excellent rogue-like space game for your mobile

Between Out There and Pixels Dungeon, the arrival of true rogue-likes on our mobile phones is more than good news: it’s a sign that there’s now a place in the market for real quality games, which are far from the minimalist products full of micro-transactions that are seen all too often.

Gripping, difficult, deep, surprising: Out There is an excellent game that’s a must-have for any fan of science fiction.