Buzz Aldrin's Space Program Manager Review

The nearest that pretty much any of us are going to get to exploring space is through a game. Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager takes a different route to the usual space based games, concentrating on the management efforts on Earth in order to make it possible. And thanks to some overly-wordy tutorial screens it’ll seem more more complicated than it actually is. Once you’ve cracked the surface though, you’ll soon see that Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager is a game focused squarely on Resource Management rather than anything more lofty.

One of those key resources is the value of time. Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager is broken up into various seasons. Each task, such as building a new unit or working towards improving upon a rocket design takes a number of season to complete. A lot of the time, you’re going to be assigning tasks before hitting the ‘end season’ button and waiting for a report back to see how well it all went.

Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager is quite cyclical in that respect, with you soon ending up in a routine. That doesn’t seem immediately apparent though, as the tutorial loves to explain things in a mildly convoluted fashion. There are a ton of statistics to bear in mind, admittedly. Really though, it’s all a matter of training staff before assigning them to research hardware, and eventually launch a space mission.

Is it fun? Kind of. It’s satisfying to work on upping those percentages and launching a rocket, in the hope of reaching space. Such satisfaction takes a while to get to though, and the rest of the time is a bit formulaic and tedious. It’s not the most exciting of titles to look at either, invoking memories of strategy games from years ago.

Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager covers for such tedium with plenty of great historical references, thanks to keeping closely to the timeline of the 1960s, as well as offering up a huge database of relevant information. Where the game might falter in terms of excitement, it more than makes up for with fascinating facts.

That means that your sense of enjoyment is mostly going to come down to how much you’re excited by space. Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager isn’t a great management game but it does offer a theme that few other titles can provide. For that reason alone, it might just about be worth that asking price.