Take an old-school turn-based space combat game and make it a PS mini, what have you got? Star Hammer Tactics, from Black Lab Games. The game truly reminds me of old PC turn-based games from maybe 15 years ago. Even the graphics and sounds have a retro feel to them. 
The game’s campaign mode focuses around the Human/Nautilid conflict and sees you taking on the role of a commander during battle after battle. None of which are extremely interesting or even entertaining.
The game isn’t all that exciting. As with all turn-based games you and the enemy take turns moving and shooting. The maps are laid out in tiny square grids which determine movement distance and when combat ensues (you have to be next to an enemy ship to engage them obviously). Some levels have asteroids, but not so many to be useful during a battle. They generally just get in the way more than anything.
Ships can either engage in close 
combat or fire missiles. The missiles are some of the dumbest kind of missiles I’ve ever seen as they will on occasion, plow straight into one of your nearby ships. What I found is that many missiles will need to move in a direction away from the ship, up or down. It seems there are no front missile bays to shoot from. So if you have a ship nearby, say two squares below the ship firing the missile, then it might hit it. There’s no warning of this in the game’s help so, be warned.
All combat is decided sort of randomly from what I can see. Each ship does have a number of hull integrity points and you are able to manipulate the balance between offense and defense for several action points (see next paragraph) but combat takes place automatically in each turn that ships are adjacent to each other.
Each ship has 10 action points per round. These can be used to move, fire missiles, manipulate offense/defense balance. Each action requires a certain amount of points:
- Firing a missile - 5 points
- Adjusting off/def - 2 points
The amount of movement a ship can do in a turn depends on the type of ship as does the damage it can inflict. Much smaller ships may have an advantage over a much larger opponent as they can duck and weave through the defenses (according to the help) and might score a critical hit.
Overall, the game is sort of boring. The graphics are retro as are the sounds but so is the gameplay and there’s almost no challenge in most levels so I don’t see why many people would play this for any period of time. It’s also like no hought was put into other things like the fonts used or the backgrounds which are neither animated nor all that interesting in general. The game is just sort of bland I guess.
