Cosmic Explorer: Redshift Review

Developer: Ernesto Hernandez
Price: FREE
Version Reviewed: 1.0.1
App Reviewed on: iPhone 5

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At first, Cosmic Explorer: Redshift seems like a pretty promising game. In a similar vein to Oregon Trail, you embark upon a series of missions with your crew, making difficult decisions as you go along. Where Cosmic Explorer: Redshift falters is how it informs you of these perils, as well as leaves you feeling like too much comes down to luck.

Starting out, you pick a mission before picking out a captain and crew. Each completed mission gives you money which can then be used to unlock new crew members and so forth. Each session plays out kind of like a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ game, offering up a series of choices. Often, you come across other spaceships asking for your assistance in some way, and you have to decide if it’s worth it.

Resources are everything in Cosmic Explorer: Redshift and your long mission requires you to have sufficient fuel, food, ammo, and health in order to survive. It’s a constant balancing act and starvation or simply running out of fuel isn’t hard to achieve. A progress bar along the top tells you how everything is faring with your team soon dying if you run out of supplies.

The problem is it all feels so random. Different things arise and some runs prove easier than others. There’s also the issue that the same events repeat themselves frequently meaning Cosmic Explorer: Redshift can become quite tedious after a time, not helped by the fact you don’t become attached to your teammates. It leads to a soulless experience. You need to be able to care about your team, and there's little here to make you feel attached to what happens. It also doesn’t lend itself to mobile play with each mission taking a while to complete.

There’s certainly potential here but it’s not sufficient to keep you hooked. All too soon, you’ll find yourself a little bored by the outcome and how dying can come all too fast, simply because you got unlucky with some choices.