Space Trader has some neat ideas but is not executed perfectly.

Every now and then a game just catches my curiosity and I am not satisfied until I buy it and see what it is all about. Space Trader is one of those games, traveling between planets buying and selling goods while helping people hunt bounties on the side for extra cash. On the surface it sounds like a lot of fun, and to its credit it really is. However, once you dig past the surface there isn't much to see. 
 
You start the game as a fresh trader who just obtained their licence which is needed for well, trading in space. There is a small problem though, you have no space ship. After helping oil up a man with prosthetic legs he sends you to a friend named Sally Barris who gives you a ship assuming you use it to make enough money to pay for it, and that is about where any sort of story stops. There are a few things at the start and end of the games 5 chapters but they serve no purpose other than to get you to a new destination to buy and sell products.. 
 

Of course, the developers fully realize this and the game never tries to be something it is not. At its core Space Trader is all about running around trying to make a profit. The gameplay is very simple, you travel to and from various planets talking to a handful of vendors on each planet all of which sell goods that you can buy. These vendors will also buy anything you wish to sell. Over the course of the chapter the price of each individual good changes over time, so the key to beating the game is buying at a low cost and selling higher. Once you figure that out Space Trader stops being interesting and becomes more of a grind.  
 
The goal of most chapters is to reach a specific money amount within a set time limit. Time only flows when you travel from one planet to another and at first the task of making large sums of money selling cheap goods may seem daunting but when you learn that every planet always has something cheap to buy which can be sold later for large sums of money, any sort of challenge is gone. Which is really Space Traders biggest flaw, nothing ever changes or develops through the entire game which can take well over 10 hours to complete. The things you buy and sell at the start of the game are what you will be selling at the end and it can get very repetitive very quickly. It doesn't help that the save system is pretty busted too, you can only save after completing specific tasks which means you have a limited amount of saves while in a chapter and if you fail to make enough money within the time limit given you must restart the entire chapter. While the latter never happened to me I often found myself wanting to take a break but knowing there was no perfect time to save and quit.  
 

Aside from all the buying and selling there are also bounties that can be accepted from bars which is where Space Trader starts to feel more like a traditional first person shooter. Unfortunately, these missions feel more like an after thought than anything. Every single bounty is the same, you are transported to one of a handful of maps littered with sloppy AI enemies and must survive until the bounty arrives. You kill him, take his stash that can be sold for pure profit, and call it a job well done. My biggest complaint with these is how they just feel like a mini-game separate from what your true goal is. You don't collect guns, worry about ammunition, or anything of the sort; every bounty you start with a pistol and can find one of three guns lying around the map. You, however, never actually own a single of these guns as  when the mission ends you lose everything but that default pistol. It really feels like a missed opportunity since adding things like gun management and an upgrade system would put another layer on a boney game and make the first person shooting sections quite a bit more fun.  
 
It doesn't help the shooting either that Space Trader is not a good looking game. Compared to others, even other indie games, you might think that Space Trader came out years before it actually did. That said there is a lot of charm to it. The various planets you travel too have this super futuristic feel to them with floating platforms and chairs, projection panels that simulate waterfalls, and so on. Actually I found the games style so good I managed to get past how bad it really looks from a technical stand point. 
 
Really though, at such a low price tag Space Trader isn't a huge risk for anyone based on any of these factors. For how simple and repetitive buying and selling is the game seems to over stay its welcome, and really other games have mastered this style of play a lot better. It is the kind of game just begging for a much more refined sequel since there are a lot of great directions the game could expand.