When it’s time to see whether you can actually put anything into space without it exploding, the game shifts to Mission Control mode. Combine this with how equipment reliability increases each season, and it’s decision time: do you push now and hope to get lucky and not kill anyone, or do you ensure mission success, which gets you prestige and money, but risk seeing you competitor’s rocket soar through the sky while you sit on Earth sipping drinks Mad Men style? Add the need to repeatedly upgrade your spaceport facilities to hire more staff, and the game gets pleasantly hectic. However, and here’s the fun part, you can skip most of the mission steps, but if you skip one to save time and money, you’ll increase the possibility of the next mission step failing. There are many choices to make as you are trying to coordinate numerous space programs each with a number of mission configurations (smaller development steps). As the Director, you’ll constantly have to decide which programs to open and when to send your staff and astronauts for training. Now, this wouldn’t be a management game if you didn’t have to deal with planning the component development and staff training for maximum efficiency in minimum time. By the time the X-15 has safely landed back to earth, you’ll have opened various space programs, hired technical personnel to work either in R&D or at your shiny new Mission Control Center, and hired astronauts and cosmonauts willing to risk their lives to see their house from space. The game starts you off with a lengthy, but quite necessary, tutorial in which Buzz leads you from constructing the first Mission Control Center to launching the X-15, the world’s first operational spaceplane. All these modes come in three difficulty settings. In addition to the campaigns, there’s a sandbox mode for each agency that offers a more open-ended experience. The GSA campaign is, instead, a race against bureaucrats as it’s all about meeting short-term goals set by the government. If you pick either of the first two, then you are racing for the Moon. You can play a campaign as NASA, the SSA, or GSA. ![]() There’s quite a bit of content in SPM that more than justifies the game’s $9.99 price tag. The good thing is that you can turn the music down in-game and, instead, enjoy your choice of period-appropriate tunes. ![]() The text can also get tiring as it’s rather small and often hard to read.The music isn’t great either, with one theme for each agency playing on a loop. This would be fine if you didn’t have to go through most of those menus and submenus on every single turn, making their sameness painfully apparent. While the menus are well-organized, they all look a bit too similar. The UI consists mostly of a series of menus, submenus, and submenus of submenus. Visually, the game isn’t the prettiest, as some members of the forum have also pointed out, but I find the graphics adequate for a game of this genre.
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