Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space Reviews

This game is delightful.

The turn-based space exploration portions have plenty of humor, wit, and charm. There's several amusing and memorable alien races. The variety of planetary encounters and the unexpected main quests that pop up from time to time keep the game surprising and fresh for a long time. There's lots of reading involved, at least compared to most computer games, but it's got a friendly user-interface and enough jokes to make that reading a bonus instead of a complaint.

The real-time starship combat portions are very challenging, and you'll find yourself picking your battles carefully if you want to win and survive. Decisions about armament and formation are meaningful and important, and the game play is solid. The pace is quick and the length of a game is short, so you can explore an entire galaxy in half an hour, and even a bad battle that wrecks your fleet doesn't spoil the fun.

Play balance is a little haphazard, but since the games are short, I find that too is a feature instead of a bug. You'll play one game in which an early discovery leads to rapid victory, but then the next game you get crushed by treacherous aliens. If at first you don't succeed, play play again.

Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space is the perfect game for a lunchbreak (or other spare hour when you'd otherwise be twiddling your thumbs), a game you'll return to repeatedly over the years. It's one of my absolute favorites.

My only complaints about the game have to do with modding. It claims to be easy to mod, but I find creating mods (and I've made several for it) is more complicated and limited than the package lets on. But if you're just looking for a good game to play and enjoy off the shelf, that minor gripe about modding is a non-issue.