Smugglers 5 - 11/20 hours

Starting over a military officer, I was able to work my way up from a lowly ensign, commanding a corvette to an admiral, at the helm of a mighty battleship, governing a planet and with more than 100 million credits in the bank. I've not yet retired, but I expect when I do it will be with a new high score.

The journey was mostly repetitive. The combat system in this game is about 20% player skill, 40% ship build, and 40% luck. What you do is line up face to face with the enemy ship and at the bottom of the screen are a bunch of ability cards. These cards give special bonuses to your ship's attack or defense, or offer special actions like an EMP attack, boarding action, or shield recharge. The cards appear randomly and the selection of available cards can mean the difference between life and death,

It's a system that could be fun, but it has its flaws. Gaining more character skills tends to dilute your card pool. Yes, it's great to potentially have a powerful new attack, but when you expand horizontally on the skills tree, you find that your bread-and-butter abilities are often crowded out by highly situational skills. What's worse is drawing the boarding action or escape cards early in the battle and then not having them available when you might actually need them.  There's also a tendency for fights (even easy ones) to drag on unnecessarily when you get a run of bad draws. Though perhaps that's a drawback to having a powerful ship that can survive quite a long time before facing defeat.

The most annoying part of Smugglers 5's military life has to be the strategy, though. Basically, the plot of the game is that there's a space civil war going on, and each of the four factions is trying to conquer the whole of settled human space. Your character can help shift the tides of this war by flying to disputed systems and doing missions for your faction. Do enough missions and the system changes sides. Fair enough, except that the systems seem to be disputed at random, with no consideration for strategic usefulness, the ability of the player to reinforce the NPC armies, or the larger political situation. Often times, you will get done conquering a system, and then find that your next two potential conflicts are on opposite sides of the map and if they're both defensive missions, it can be a frustrating game of whack-a-mole as you try and compensate for the AIs fickleness in picking fights that only sporadically advance its ostensible agenda.

It would be nice if I could influence when and where the invasions took place (you know, seeing as how I'm an admiral and all), but it is what it is. I've just got to follow the action and hope for the best. Now, if I could only remember which planet is mine . . .