14 DAY TRIAL // Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager is not the most complex video game and there are moments when the presentation and the mechanics let the theme down, but the game does manage to succeed in one area: it shows how risk works in the real world and delivers some catastrophic setbacks that gamers need to recover from.
Basically, in order for a project to succeed, players need to research the involved piece of hardware, from space capsules to rockets and other equipment.
This involves humans, and once the reliability of the ensemble goes over 80 percent, gamers can attempt a launch.
During my first few campaigns I was annoyed to see that despite that threshold my missions tended to fail and astronauts died, while pieces of equipment actually became worse and required more R&D in the long term.
Then I understood that Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager was offering an important lesson, which is directly linked to its theme: there’s no way to prepare for the unknown perfectly and the disasters of the real world space programs were actually necessary to its success.
In my current Russian campaign, which has been evolving quite well, I tend to wait for rockets and capsules to be above 90% before I launch them, and even then I see how the tension is rising as the mission progresses.
