14 DAY TRIAL // The Last Federation is a very good small game, an experience that sets clear limits for the player while giving him a universe that he can explore at will, learning its rules and then finding ways to use them in order to reach the ultimate goal of the campaign.
I have already spend about 20 hours trying various strategies to get the included races to join together rather than fight each other, dying in the ship-based combat or quitting in order to try out a new way of playing the title created by Arcen Games.
I might abandon the title soon because there are other new releases competing for my time and in order to return to some of my personal obsessions, but I do think that the developers of The Last Federation have plenty of ways to expand the game universe and re-capture my attention in the near future.
I would play a strategy game based on the same randomly generated solar systems that the current release uses while offering me the ability to pick a race and then control them as they try to dominate the rest.
Such a title could focus on the relationships between the factions and the various unique ways in which they approach the task of becoming the main force in the system, rather than on actual ship to ship combat.
It could further explore the interplay between technology, the various government types and the four main attributes for each planet.
It would be cool for the developers to also include the characters created in the current version of the game as free agents in a potential strategy version, acting against the interest of the empire that the gamer controls, adding an extra layer of interaction.
I would also play an expanded version of The Last Federation with its current mechanics, but with a larger roster of solar systems, more races to interact with and a bigger outside threat that they would need to be united in order to face.
Arcen Games has managed to create a game universe that feels very unique and versatile and I would love to see how they adapt it to other genres in the future.
Until then, I will probably make The Last Federation one of the titles that I regularly return to just in order to explore some of its possibilities and see how each race acts as an antagonist.