Pioneer – A space game

By: Lorne Whiting

On: May 11th, 2009

Pioneer is one of them space shooter games. Like, uh, well, all those space shooter games from Asteroids onward.

The game has some charm, with interesting characters and some nice art, but it’s kinda held back by little flaws.
The game is hit-or-miss, the ships look good, as you can see in the screenshot, but everything sort of lacks impact, the lasers don’t feel so much like weapons as pea-shooters, and the game is very slow paced, which makes playing it feel kind of like a chore, which is a shame because it seems like there’s an interesting narrative behind the game. Speaking of narrative, the characters, from what I saw in the demo, are kinda two-dimensional, but their portraits are interesting, with a unique pixelly style. So the gameplay is kinda slow and not as good as games like Moonpod’s Starscape (but what is, huh?) it’s got a stronger plot than most of these space shooters.

Anyway, try it out, as I said, it’s hit or miss, so I’m sure some people will like it, and some won’t, but either way it’s a small download at 60MB.