Astrox is a Hostile Space Excavation Simulator but what exactly does that mean?

Well, it's a game that takes place in Astrox, a sort of section of space designated for prisioners to live out their days by making money for corperations by mining astorids. The hostility comes from pirates if, that attack yourself and other miners in an attempt to gain more resources without actually having to mine.

How did you end up in this prision in the first place? "Thought crimes against the Corporate Federation" It is apparently a crime in this distant future to disapprove of the corporation/government enitity.

Now, why exactly would you even bother mining in the first place? Well, apparently if you can manage to get enough resources you can buy your way out of the system. But that's enough on the background, and more about the game itself.

You start off of course with a tiny ship, one small fighter laser, and one small mining laser. You'll spend the first 15 minutes or so learning basic controls through the tutorial/storyline mechanic, that explains how to fight, mine, upgrade, and find different sectors.

The starting weapon is completely useless, and should be replaced as soon as possible. The fighting itself is interestingly intricate, you can 'autopilot' yourself while attacking enemies, or manually control flight, which you'll need to do for fast manuvers. Different types of weapons will have different requirements with how flexible you need to be. Some weapons can be set to autofire, while you go into autopilot. Others will require you to manually fire, and attempt to stay in range with specific manuvers, closer to a traditional dogfighting game.

The mining aspect of the game is increadibly straight-forward. Better resources are harder to mine, different stations/merchants will pay different prices for items. The game also includes a goods trading system, for basic and advanced supplies (food, water, metals, etc) which can be incorporated with mining to produce the most credits (the ingame currency)

The games graphics are well done, and remind myself somewhat of the old 'homeworld' games in it's style. The music is usually an ambient 'space' background, but features more exciting music during fights. The creator of the game is a single person, Momoguru, who includes links to a forum and free music downloads of the ingame soundtrack. He is also the creator of CodelinkV2, a spiritual sucessor to the Uplink series from Introvision.

Overall the game is pretty addictive, combining many different elements and giving you several different ways to complete any one task. The primary points of the game are Mining, Fighting, and Trading, which it balances pretty well between the three.

My only complaint on the game, is that it tends to get repetitive, dispite attempts to mix it up. However, that's something that could be said for almost every game of this type.