Second Galaxy Review: The Space Exploration MMORPG We’ve All Been Waiting For?

Second Galaxy is a highly-anticipated space MMORPG that just hit the various mobile app stores. It allows you to explore a universe full of space pirates, intense ship combat, and a heck of a lot of upgrades. It’s still a …

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Second Galaxy is a highly-anticipated space MMORPG that just hit the various mobile app stores. It allows you to explore a universe full of space pirates, intense ship combat, and a heck of a lot of upgrades. It’s still a pretty novel experience on mobile, which doesn’t have an awful lot of space MMORPGs.

And we’ve generally enjoyed our time with it so far. We’re usually put off by the complexity of these types of experiences but Second Galaxy does a terrific job of easing you in gently. Normally, we absolutely hate opening tutorials that prevent you from doing what you want until they’re beat, but we felt we actually needed it this time around.

You start by getting introduced to the world proper. You play as some kind of sci-fi police officer that spends their time hunting down space pirates. Quite quickly you get promoted to an FBI-type figure who pretty much carries on battling space pirates alongside your father’s ex-partner. It doesn’t win any awards for originality, but the writing is generally quite engaging – which surprised us.

The story is told between missions, which generally involve battling space pirates and gathering resources. Combat is easily a highlight of Second Galaxy, and really gives you a good sense of what life would be like as a space combatant. It’s also very straightforward. One the left of the screen you’ll have a list of the nearest combatants, and can simply tap on one to engage them.

The Space Pirate-themed Plot is Surprisingly Engaging

There’s a virtual button on the right to lock onto the target, at which point your ship will automatically orbit the enemy. Then, it’s a case of tapping on your various weapons off-cooldown to deal damage. You’ve also got various different parts that can assist you in battle, including a shield, thrusters, and some other parts that we don’t know what the heck are. They generally provide you with various buffs.

As you progress throughout the experience you’ll unlock an absolute ton of ships and upgrades, and can really customise your ship to your own liking. We’ve only got a small taste of it so far, but we enjoyed picking out parts for our ship while balancing the power and processor needs.

You can’t just equip the most powerful parts and be done. You’ve got a limited amount of processing and battery power, and have to juggle their needs as well as ensuring you have the parts and weapons you need to survive. It’s a fun problem to have, surprisingly.

You’re also not limited to a single ship. Initially, you can customise and have three ships ready for the upcoming missions, but you’ll unlock more ships and slots as you progress. This means you can have different ships for different scenarios, like a speed specialist and combat juggernaut.

Not that we’ve seen much need for that with the various different missions so far. It’s all been go to location on galaxy map, shoot space pirates, profit. Not that we’re complaining much at this point – we like the combat – but we’d expect things to shake up a bit longterm or it will easily get repetitive.

Ship Combat is a Highlight in Second Galaxy

In terms of presentation, Second Galaxy is a mixed bag. We really appreciate the ship designs and environments, where you’re often battling enemies with a backdrop of stars, meteors, and huge looming planets. The warp drive animation, which propels you quickly to the new location, is also awesome, and we never tired of seeing it.

However, bumping the visuals to the top left us a little disappointed. We were playing on an iPad Pro, and the resolution didn’t seem to be set to the same as our display. This resulted in a lot of jaggy edges and blurriness, which took the edge off of the beautiful visuals. Hopefully this will be sorted in a future update.

Whenever you level up, you can place attribute points that improve your statistics. You can also visit the academy and upgrade your skills in a variety of different areas. It feels like a box-ticking exercise, but we like that small drip-feed of progression in MMORPGs.

Overall, we’re cautiously optimistic about Second Galaxy. It’s a decent space-faring MMORPG that offers acceptable writing, lots of ship combat, and a wealth of upgrades. We’re slightly concerned about longterm repetitiveness and the visuals could do with a bit of a bump. If you’ve been waiting for a game like this though, you probably won’t be disappointed.

The good

  • Space combat is extremely fun
  • Decent visuals
  • Surprisingly engaging writing

The bad

  • Resolution could use a bump
  • Gets quite repetitive over time
80 out of 100

Head of Editorial
Glen has over a decade's worth of experience in gaming journalism, writing for Pocket Gamer, Pocket Tactics, Nintendo Life, and Gfinity. When he's not badgering everyone about the dangers of passive text, you can probably find him playing Wild Rift.