The classic lives! – Spaceward Ho! Review

I've been a Spaceward Ho! fan since high school, two decades ago, and have been waiting for this resurrection since the iPad was first released and the developer mentioned they were working on a port. I actually bought the game back when it was iPad only even though I didn't have an iPad out of pure solidarity, but it's been universal for years now, and the truth is I've wasted more time playing this classic than any of the fancy new games I own. The mechanics are simple, but there is endless variety in play. I particularly love sparse random galaxies with a number of opponents, since there is such variety from game to game. This is an incredibly faithful port of the original, with shinier graphics and every feature and Easter egg old fans will know and love. The interface has been translated well to the phone screen, and small galaxies make for a short enough game to play during a 15 minute break while you can crank up galaxy size for an hours long game. The auto save is also flawless--I can close the app and it will always be ready to go exactly where I left off. Only a handful of complaints: 1) The tap targets, particularly on sliders, are very small, and precise slider adjustment is fiddly. 2) The graphics for inhospitably large or small planets don't look as distinctively large or small as on the original version; it's unimportant, but I like the "feel" of more obvious size differences more. 3) The only feature that seems to be missing from the original is that I seem to remember if you had a colony ship parked at a planet that got hit by a meteor shower, the inhabitants would take refuge in the ship. But maybe the trigger for that is just more narrow than I remember. I also seem to remember in-transit ship-induced meteor showers dumping metal on the planet similar to supernova, but maybe that's just a feature I thought should exist. 4) My only real complaint comes from that flawless auto save: there is no ability to go back to an earlier state. You could consider saving multiple files for the same game and reverting cheating, and a no-going-back game certainly has a different vibe, but a big part of the fun for me was seeing if it was theoretically possible to pull a win out of some extreme situations, or how the same game might have gone differently with different strategic decisions, which you just can't do without saves. This is a particularly glaring omission for huge games. One of my favorite old school games was a max-size random galaxy with 8 200 IQ opponents. The game took literally days to finish, and I'm just not going to start something like that only to find out several hours in that I'd made a simple mistake (sent the wrong fleet, for example, which is surprisingly easy to do on a 5 inch screen) or strategic blunder that cost me the game without the chance to back up a couple turns or, say, go back a thousand years and work on a different tack. Surely there could be a mechanism for holding at least one "undo" point per game, even if it meant no points for the win if you use it. All in all, though, a fantastic port. Add saving, and it will be literally perfect.
Review by Makosuke on Spaceward Ho!.