Space Food Truck Preview

When playing a game of cards, there’s a certain amount of randomness that’s to be expected. When engaging in a marathon session of Texas Hold'em, having the best strategy doesn’t always guarantee success. Yet, in contrast, when a computer-based card game feels like it’s turned against you, it’s easy to question the game’s impartiality.

Space Food Truck is a non-competitive card-based strategy game. Having not encountered one before, I immediately jumped into the tutorials menu for assistance. I found the lengthy text based ‘tutorials’ quite difficult to digest but after watching the initial ‘basics’ tutorial provided by developer One Man Left Studios’ YouTube channel, I thought it best to learn as I played - rather than try to take in everything in one big chunk.

When loading up the first playthrough, I assumed there would be a breadcrumbing process, where you would be guided down a path of how the basics of the game work. That wasn‘t the case, I was thrown into the deep end immediately, expected to take in everything from the tutorial segment.

The game revolves around four characters and their food truck. There’s just one game mode and one goal: to assist the team in cooking and delivering food across the galaxy. The Captain navigates, the Chef creates recipes and collects ingredients, the Scientist can unlock new abilities for other characters, and the Engineer repairs and upgrades your food truck.

Each character starts with an opening deck consisting of ten cards and a hand of five. At the end of each turn, their entire hand - regardless of the cards played - is discarded and eventually recycled. At the end of a character’s turn, a purchase of at least one new card needs to be made via the ZapMart Store.

Individual characters have a unique set of cards as well as universally playable cards, however, every card has a Power and Value number. The Value determines how much money that card is worth for use in the ZapMart at the end of the turn, whilst the Power number is used for power-ups, repairs, etc., and filling up the FTL meter for traveling.

At the end of each turn, there is a random event. These are crucial moments that can be either something remedial like ‘draw a card’ or have a big effect on how your next turns unfold such as timed tasks. Yet, because of their evident chance-based nature, your game can fall apart within just a couple of turns, regardless of how well you have played up until that point.

Let me give you an example of my first ever game. There was an ‘infestation’ in the kitchen that required two characters have to move to that area of the ship in a certain amount of turns, otherwise, the ship took damage - a seemingly simple task, I thought.

To move to that part of the ship, I needed to wait for that character’s turn in order to move them, then, have a Hall Pass card available to play. Waiting for the turn to come around, I didn’t have a hall pass card, so I had to wait another three turns. By then, I had the Hall Pass card but other random events unfolded in the three turns proceeding that stopped me from accessing the room in trouble because the door was broken. So, waiting for the Engineer’s turn to come around, I had run out of turns and the ship took damage - and that was just before I’d even moved anyone!

My first game lasted a mere 17 turns when the aforementioned took place, whereas my second run lasted a little longer, at 42 turns. Everything was going fine, until a string of bad cards and random events took me down a genuinely irreversible path, despite trying to prepare for the worst.

My final few turns had me tasked to move every one of my characters to my food truck’s stern, despite two broken doors and a need to leave the solar system I was in to avoid being attacked. The final nail in the coffin was a ‘Boom!’ random event occurring two turns out of three, dealing six damage to my ship. As a reference, from the start of your game, your shield has two HP and your ship five - so if the game decided to, I could have been almost wiped out before turn three, it just so happened to occur later in this run.

Often, room specific random events can stack up, needing multiple characters to move around different rooms on their turn, resulting in an endless spiral of failure because of the lack of Hall Pass cards, broken doors and waiting for character’s turns to roll around whilst still trying to progress in the overall mission to get the food to the specific part of the galaxy (...and breathe).

Oh, and by the way, character specific moves can only be made in their respective rooms, so if you want to cook something and the chef is assisting something in the Bridge, you’re bloomin’ stuffed.

You see what I’m getting at here? You’re fighting with a randomly generated set of events, which can, and will, become near impossible to overcome, even for advanced players.

Sure, I understand that card games have an element of randomness to them, but the amount of reliance on how Space Food Truck plays itself just means that you are praying something monumentally awful won’t happen at the end of each turn, messing up your primary objective.

I know I’ve gone on about my individual ventures for a considerable amount of time during this preview, whilst trying to explain things in as best terms as possible. Yet, the comments on Space Food Truck’s Steam page express similar problems. As an Early Access game, detailed community feedback is I’m sure appreciated by One Man Left Studios, to better enhance the game for a full, post-alpha release.

That being said, there’re a lot of positives to take from this Early Access title - the visuals are really engaging and the game’s core concept is very solid, with procedurally generated galaxies ensuring an at least slightly different experience to every new game.

I’m looking forward to seeing how One Man Left Studios battle with the evident randomisation imbalance. Once resolved, this game could garner complex and varied tactics that many players are bound to enjoy. Space Food Truck is difficult to recommend in its current state but is certainly one to keep an eye on, especially for its generous price.