Profiteer Review – For Fun and Profit

Space!

Space! The final frontier… is an old hat now. Now it’s simply another job, and you’re just the shmuck to do that job. The interplanetary trading job, specifically. What you trade, how you attempt to keep other competing traders from snagging a good deal before you, and whether you try to trade in black market goods or stay above-board, are all up to you in Profiteer . But the real question, of course, is whether or not this game is worth your hard-earned space bucks.

Profiteer can be a little off-putting initially, at least from an aesthetic standpoint. The characters are all ugly — not poorly done, mind you, but genuinely ugly — and the artwork reminds me of old science fiction covers and movies, before the genre really got much mainstream attention. It’s oddly nostalgic, and so I personally was able to enjoy it after that initial shock. Some people I know might not be so nice to the artwork, but hey, I actually rather liked the style once I got used to it.

Profiteer’s gameplay is fairly indirect. Rather than moving a character around an environment, you are controlling a ship that you never really see, moving cargo that is only really seen as icons and names, and trying to screw over other traders whose names you might not even know, if you were terrible like me and didn’t do everything in the tutorial.  That’s not to say I didn’t understand how to play the game – though as usual I was pretty bad at it. At first glance, it seems extremely straightforward. In fact, it seems so straightforward that I was worried the game would get old very quickly. But a whole bunch of things come together to make Profiteer more enjoyable than you might think at first glance.

As the main aim of the game is trading, the focus of most of the menus is related either to money or how you can make it. One button leads you to the planet’s market, and a sub-menu there will tell you which planets are overstocked or in desperate need of particular products. This interplay makes it fairly easy to figure out which products to buy and where to go to sell them, but there are a couple of complications with this. Firstly, will selling to a particular planet mess up a competitor? If not, is there a product that will do that? Secondly, are you trying to move illegal products? If so, are you willing to take the risk that your goods might be confiscated?

Once you’ve considered all of this, you also have to make sure you have enough fuel, decide whether or not to store money in the bank to keep it safe from pirates and other mishaps, whether to borrow money from the loanshark Freddy Fingers – or pay it back if you’re already in debt – and check the news to see if an impending disaster might turn your otherwise uneventful trip to another planet into a nightmare. In other words, there are a lot of moving parts, hidden behind the simple surface of the interface. It makes what looks on its surface to be a painfully simple game into an interesting and enjoyable mobile experience.

The music is fairly interesting as well, since each planet has its own background and, rather understandably, different styles of music to accompany them. One planet appears to be Scottish, while another gives off music that sounds straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It adds a bit of needed atmosphere to an otherwise static-feeling game.

I played with Profiteer Lite , which only allows you play for 10 weeks (i.e. ten trades or, more technically, ten jumps between planets), but it feels like there is a whole lot more to game than what I got out of the tutorial and free version. That said, what I did find was a game that, while far from perfect, is definitely enjoyable.

Those interested can download the free version for Android here, or the full game here, for the price of $1.15 USD. Unfortunately, there is no iOS or Windows Phone version of the game out yet, though the developer, RokSoft, has not actually said he wouldn’t try to port it (that of course means he hasn’t said he will , either).