Space Run Galaxy is the sequel to Space Run, a rather unusual game that combines tower defense, fast paced combat and inventory management. The unique gimmick in Space Run Galaxy is that it's not the enemies that move along a path, it's you. You are a Space Runner, essentially a delivery guy in space. But space is a dangerous place full of aliens, asteroids and pirates, so you have to defend yourself against the never ending assault until you reach your goal.
The gameplay centes mainly around the deliveries. Your spaceship flies along a linear path automatically until it reaches the next space station. As you move along the path, enemies will spawn in one of 8 different locations and start attacking you or, in the case of asteroids, will simply ram you if you do not shoot them down first. Your ship can build various weapons and other useful modules on its surface to defend yourself. The ship is made up of multiple hexagon tiles. Each module covers one or more of these tiles and has to be fit in a specific way so that it can work. Turrets nmeed to be at the edge of your ship and point in the direction they fire, shields and repair modules have to be placed next to other modules and thrusters have to be placed behind the ship. Modules each have their own HP and can be shot down by enemies but you can easily replace them. Many enemies will also be made of the same hexagon tiles with multiple modules on their ship that you can shoot down.
Destroying enemies gives the player hexanuts which can be used to buy more modules. If you are short on money you can also turn off your thrusters for a moment so they can produce a small amount of hexanuts for you. This however is risky because your clients not only want their stuff, they want it fast. Each mission has a time requirement and if you want to fulfill it you need extra thrusters to get more speed. More speed can be however be risky since you now move faster along the path which also attracts enemy waves faster. It's a clever risk vs reward system, I always love these kind of things.

The game features three types of modules that are color coded for convenience. Red is for offense, blue is for defense and green is for utility. These modules can be upgraded with their respective colored booster. Boosters are special modules that don't do anything on their own and instead boost adjacent modules of the same color. Each module has two upgrade levels that improve their abilities. To make connecting modules easier you can also build connectors, which spread effects across the ship. This allows you to apply a single booster to multiple turrets.
Most modules also have active abilities. These require energy to be used but are very useful to have more control over combat. Usually your turrets attack what's closest to them but laser turrets for example have a manual shot as an active ability that deals massive damage, ideal to take down a single harmful module of the enemy. You get energy from your thrusters, they generate energy over time and also act as storage unit for energy which gives you even more reasons to buy more thrusters.

One big change compared to Space Run is that the game now features an overoworld map. The game world is divided into multiple space stations that are connected with paths, you can now select freely where you want to move and even can take alternate paths if you don't want the direct route. But these space stations not only act as waypoints, they also feature different kinds of shops. You can buy materials, new ships or craft new modules that you can use for your next missions. You can pay these merchants with credits and materials which you get from missions. But these materials are only aviable on the space station where you obtained them unless you move them somewhere else.

And this brings me to Space Run Galaxy's multiplayer economy. The game is hosted on official servers and allows players to generate contracts for other players. You can put up a contract to ship your materials to another station. Players who take on contracts not only get money but also have a chance to get the same materials they just carried. If you have too many materials yourself you can also sell them directly to other players. Or you could just gift them to a friend, this also is possible.
This however brings me to a negative point of the game. When the game was still new and the playerbase big, you would see many contracts and a healthy marketplace. Now, many years after the initial launch, there are not many offers open anymore. Most of the players that still play the game have moved on to late game space stations which makes it harder for new players to get money and materials they would need. You can technically just replay the contracts from npcs but these are not as valuable to do in my opinion. This should be considered if you want to buy the game.

Another negative aspect is the grind in general. Materials and credits are not rare but it's annoying that very single module you craft gets increasingly more expensive and crafting a module allows you to only place it once per run which means you have to craft many of them. This is of course designed to encourage the player market but its a hindrance now that most of the playerbase is gone. Expect to spend a lot of time in this game if you want to progress at all.
And the most annoying aspect of Space Run is still relevant in Galaxy: No pause function during combat. Since you can issue active commands on your modules it would be helpful if you could pause and use multiple at the same time, especially against those bosses with their massive ships that launch an entire barrage of lasers and rockets at you, given you barely any time to react before your modules are gone.
Repeating a mission multiple times because you lost a single turret and are now stuck in a cycle of rebuilding and losing modules feels also very bad but this is more of a minor issue since missions last only around 5 to 10 minutes at best. Would be nice however if we could speed up some of the animations.

Overall, the game is really fun if you can live with the grind and are willing to put more than just a few hours into it. The difficulty can sometimes feel unfair but there always is a solution to any mission, you just have to find it. My only regret is that we never got a third game in the series and likely never will since the devs moved on to new games.

addictive , fun and you can have 5 minute games