Outer space has compelled humanity as long as we’ve been humans, which has led to varied explorations of space survival in all types of media, including games. However, many of these games have either been focused on ship-to-ship space combat or FPS combat once you’ve landed on a planet (or both!), leaving pacifists out in the cold. Well, if you’ve ever been in the market for a space sim where you could just peacefully travel the galaxy trading wares without ever having to deal with combat, Galaxy Trader is the game for you.
A true focus on merchant and trading gameplay
In Galaxy Trader, you travel around space discovering new planets and moons with the main goal of buying low, selling high, and if you’re lucky, finding resource caches that lead to pure profit. That’s it! It’s a very simple game, but this focus makes it a very satisfying experience that’s really easy to jump into and get yourself lost in.
Interesting and engaging space travel
Another key aspect is that the space travel itself is just hands-on enough to keep your attention, while being accessible enough that anyone can do it. This means that the minute-to-minute gameplay of traveling between planets, which could otherwise be boring or feel like filler, is just as much of the experience as the trading aspects of the game are. The fact that you can only hit certain speeds once you’re far enough away from any surrounding celestial objects gives this game something of a Euro Truck Simulator vibe too (well, I assume so anyways, as I’ve never played that game).
A sense of freedom
The main sense you get when playing Galaxy Trader is a sense of the freedom to do whatever you want. In fact, after the extremely short tutorial, the game tells you as much by unleashing you on the galaxy, rather than sending you to a list of specific plants to start with or something like that. This gives Galaxy Trader the feel of other freedom-filled games with merchant aspects like Horizon’s Gate and Sid Meier’s Pirates, but since Galaxy Trader doesn’t have any combat at all, it might be an even better option for a certain type of gamer.
Even if you don’t mind combat, it’s always interesting to play games like this that completely eliminate combat, since so many games are centered around their combat gameplay. By completely omitting combat, games have to introduce other types of upgrade paths that don’t have anything to do with weapons, which usually ends up being more interesting than a focus on weapons. Galaxy Trader has chosen to focus on different ships you can fly around and trade with as well as different parts of the galaxy you can unlock and explore, though I have not gotten very far yet myself.
You can buy Galaxy Trader on itch.io to get DRM-free versions for both Windows and Android for just $3.50 at full price. You can also buy it at the Google Play Store for the same price (well, $3.49), but then you have to deal with DRM, you don’t get the Windows version, and the solo developer gets a smaller cut.
