Quick Review: Spaceport Hope

A courier investigating a strange, multi-planet conspiracy!

Just the first blood. Slugs are great first enemies.

Developed by team BitClub, published by them and Sunken Treasure Games, and released on April 15th, 2016, Spaceport Hope is a platforming action shooter with very light Metroidvania elements. Your character is a courier (…no name given, who cares about names anyway), and he lives in a town on a planet led by a nebulous Government that seems to also rule over several planets in the system. At the beginning of the game, he is tasked with delivering a crate of medicine to the Spaceport Hope space station. However, the load turns out to be contaminated by radiations, which gets the hero in trouble. To clean his record, he must escape, investigate the situation, and find the true culprits. This adventure will take him to every planet and make him encounter pirates, hackers, and perhaps even worse.

"Shoot till their HP falls to 0." Easy to do with the base gun.
Also, monster, alien, animal, or just some random human
doing their job (that involves shooting back at you), no
matter! Shoot to kill either way!

The controls: The arrows to move, A to jump (with the ability to double jump), S to shoot. Q and W to cycle between weapons, E to interact with stuff. F to open the inventory of items, and G to open the weapon menu and toggle which guns to add to the weapon cycle. You can always shoot upwards, and downward while in midair. Your starter gun has infinite ammunition, and you find new weapons over time, with plenty of ammo lying around to reload.

A big dinosaur with poisonous spikes in the metro
tunnels. Just another day in this solar system.

Enemies don’t show health on screen as a bar that gradually decreases; instead, when you hit an enemy, a number flashes showing how much health it has left. That’s for regular enemies; bosses have the classic health bar. Most enemies and bosses have gimmicks we’ve seen before, but I can let that slide personally. The game isn’t easy per se, it’s very easy to land in a situation with too many enemies and you never have so much HP as to feel comfortable for too long. Thankfully, save points serve as respawns, and they heal the Hero anytime he touches them – but they’re also sparse enough that going back to them can be tricky.

Dangerous laboratories? Sure. Hey, I'm trying to make sense
of a situation in which I was framed, I'll visit every place that
can help me!

The Metroidvania side? While it’s among the keywords for the game, that aspect is underutilized. You never really upgrade your base abilities to access new areas, and thus you rarely have reasons to return to previous dungeons. You will be coming back to previous areas occasionally, but it will usually be because the plot opened a new dungeon in the area. A few moments do require the Hero to purchase (or find) items beforehand – like scuba-diving gear to visit an underwater dungeon, or a gas mask to bypass a wall of poisonous gas. But you’ll gather enough money from killing enemies and looting chests that getting those items shouldn’t be an issue.

Some boss battles get pretty tough, like when they have a
weak point that doesn't show up frequently. Like this guy.

As soon as you can travel through space, you have access to several minor dungeons with a handful of extras to look for, like additional health and other items you can use to get deeper into the game. You’ll also often find data to access other planets, so there are indeed pans of this universe that you won’t see until you’ve gotten to that point in the story.

Gotta love those ledge-camping enemies that foirce you to
juml in place shooting till they're dead, 'cause if you touch
them you'll get hurt.

Is Spaceport Hope amazing? Nah. Is it bad? …Not at all, actually! It ranks firmly in the “okay bordering on good” category. It doesn’t set out to break any ground and reinvent its genre; it just features very common gameplay elements, but executes them well. There’s variety in the enemies and bosses you can encounter, with many of them requiring specific strategies to deal with. You can find a decent choice of weapons, difficulty progression is steady (though, genre-wise, it feels purely like a shooter platformer and the Metroidvania aspect is barely there). I didn’t run into any gameplay issues, everything worked right. The sprite art is pretty good, and the music is alright. The story is generic, but not terrible. In short: Not a must-play, but its quality and its low price make it plenty accessible if you’re looking for another run’n’gun-like platformer.

Spaceport Hope is available on Steam for 1.99$ USD.