Gazillionaire Review

Intro

“Take my love, take my land, take me to where I cannot stand…”

The Story

Play space merchant! Taking place in what has to be the distant future, this game takes you through space where you have to control a ship and crew while making a profit as a merchant picking up supplies as you go to sell to other planets and make a profit.

The Good And The Bad

When I first saw this game listed as one that I could review, I thought that it looked interesting and so I began working on it but then I got to the main page and saw that it took place in space and instantly I was flashed back to my wonderful days of watching Firefly on DVD and started to picture myself as Captain Mal with his crew, traveling through space, picking up hot women who were seriously troubled and were in need of council… oh yes, I was excited.

Then I began to play and one by one, all my hopes for this game died. Dead. As in door knob.

On the surface this game appears to have everything that you could want in a simulation game including having to keep track of fuel, picking up passengers and dropping them off at their destination while also buying cargo to sell for a profit on other planets but other than that, there’s no real hook.

The nuances make this game interesting for a little while but very soon I began to realize that all I was doing was pointing and clicking, going back and forth between the same six planets trying to repeat the same profit that I went last time.

With no real characters to control or any kind of major disasters (occasionally something would happen to make me lose cargo to which I would be upset for about 2 seconds and then I would get over it and move on), it lacks any sort of realism that made me get really involved with it.

The graphics were kind of interesting while very cartoony. Every time you visit a planet you see a screen that shows your ship flying across (always in the same direction no less) which broke things up every once in awhile but once again, nothing that I was overly excited about.

Music

There is music in this game. I’ll give it that much. None of it is that good though as it all sounds very broken up and with very low digital quality. I’ve heard MIDI files that sounded better than the music in this game which I think is kind of sad for something that is supposed to have won tons of awards for being such a great game.

Overall

I think that the main problem that I had for this game was that I went in with such high expectation. I expected something great and was left very disappointed. Plus it didn’t help at all that this game reminded me of the TV show ‘Firefly’ in so many different ways (the first ship that you can get even looks like the Firefly! Come on, tell me I’m not the only one who saw this!) and so you can’t blame me for getting my hopes up for some kind of incredible space drama that went along with the pursuit of profit and to boldly go where only a few men have gone before.

Once you get past all the nifty little details, you discover a very hallow shell of a game that is nothing like I thought it would be. Overly praised and no where near as good as the hype, this is a game that I will let drift off into space.