Approaching Infinity on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Approaching Infinity is a turn-based space RPG in the spirit of the sci-fi classics, with endless progression and exploration. Fight tactical battles or try diplomacy. Seek powerful artifacts. Quest, mine, trade, and craft. Level up forever or attempt 1 of 10 victories in hardcore or adventure mode.
Approaching Infinity is a early access, traditional roguelike and sci-fi game
developed and published by IBOL.
Released on August 05th 2020 is available in English only on Windows.
It has received 389 reviews of which 367 were positive and 22 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.7 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 17.49€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Approaching Infinity into these genres:
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System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows 7
- Processor: 1Ghz
- Memory: 512 MB RAM
- Storage: 250 MB available space
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
I liked Approaching Infinity but I think it likely suffers from too great a vision for what was presumably a small or solo dev team. The game is divided into two parts and I'll provide some thoughts on both to help people interested in details assess if it's for them, but the TLDR for people wanting it is that I believe the focus on giving the game an "expansive" feel came at the cost of what's actually there being bland and samey. One can see the effort overall but when you get down to the details it's hard to not notice the lack of resolution and richness. It's therefore worth picking up if you're actively looking for a time sink or just really like the concepts but just bear in mind it's not a game you want to delve to deeply into, the faster you try breeze through the variety of what's on offer the more you'll be playing to its strengths. OK so let's get down to nuts and bolts. The first part of this game is space exploration: you warp your ship between sectors and then navigate around them in a rudimentary sort of tiled TBT battlefield. You can dock in stations to pick up supplies, find quests and engage in basic space commerce. On that note the space commerce was one of the highlights of this game and I was sad to see it also felt the least fleshed out. You outfit your ship with new weapons, armour, shields, utility and officers who provide special abilities, craft any stuff you feel like from your inventory and replenish nondescript "crew" whose purpose I never figured out in 30+ hours of game time beyond occasionally being told they died and needed replacing. The second part are "away team" missions: littered throughout the sectors are planets and shipwrecks that you can dock in or send a landing pod down to have a look around with your team, fulfilling quest requirements from space, finding loot and utilizing a very different set of items and officer abilities. You also find by far the best crafting parts during these missions; that's an incentive that links them to space operations and a nice design touch. As to ship life in space, there is basic combat people will be familiar with from innumerable TBT games, fairly barebones but not bad. There's nothing real time so no aiming or the like, just tab through targets and fire, but personally I quite liked that, games try to be something they're not is annoying and a roguelike exploration game didn't need some hokey half-assed arcade game thrown in, so I approve of the fact that here there is no such thing. Your ship has up to 3 different weapons and you can outfit various devices for capabilities but sadly they are mostly statistical in nature and play fairly similarly. The space combat therefore feels fairly generic, mostly just focused on the use of officer abilities which definitely saved the day in terms of gameplay interest, but otherwise just cycling through the same 2 - 3 weapons. I feel a major missed opportunity here was not allowing ships to outfit many many more weapons but just making each of them less powerful; really when you're limited to 3 weapons max it's pretty hard to pick up utility over a third of your DPS. All in all you have enough buttons to press for it to be pretty fun and I mostly found there was enough danger to keep things interesting. The space part was therefore all good, although the difficulty did have issues of too much unpredictability at times. Let's now talk the second part, the "Away Team" exploration of planets. Here we find the greatest microcosm of Approaching Infinity's strengths and weaknesses. You land your shuttle and explore, this time much closer to a traditional roguelike dungeon crawler feel. You've outfitted your team with weapons boasting different damage types and you learn to make sure you are bringing the right tools for the job and avoid running into immunities you can't deal with. You pick up a bunch of loot and for so long as you care about the overall arch of the wider game and still care about improving your ship, finding new gear and making more money, these missions retain a good level of interest. Your officers again have special abilities and they tend to be powerful enough to be interesting. The only problem, and it's not a small one, is that holy cow are the worlds themselves are very generic and boring. All the classic problems of procedural generation are here to a tee, a huge volume of undifferentiated tiles and mobs, an extremely limited selection of objects and just generally no flair. For so long as you care about the loot for the space side, however, you can overlook the flaws. So all told you're having a good time. The game's individual elements are a bit nondescript but the sheer variety of things to do, from trading to planet exploration to space combat, you haven't really noticed yet that the individual elements are not offering anything other games with clearer focus don't do better individually. The problems only begin to set in once you've mastered the games disparate elements enough that quantity no longer tricks your brain into overriding lack of quality. Space trading becomes boring because it's too simple: the number of commodities is far too low, their price fluctuations too basic, and most importantly pretty rapidly the game hits the classic game economy problem of money becoming worthless. You can before long by far and away make better equipment crafting than what is encountered in shops and at that moment suddenly the entire space commerce element of the game - hitherto its best most fun part - suddenly feels irrelevant because you're drowning in money and don't care about its reward. It's around about this time you also begin to notice the planetary exploration is boring you. You run around collecting loot only to remember that unlike earlier you don't care about the commodities because you have nothing to spend money on because what you can buy is never as useful as what you can craft anyway. So why were you doing this again? Ah yes, that's right, to get those crafting essences! You get dope crafting parts from the exploration, and they're parts you can't really get anywhere else in big numbers. So that sustains you for awhile longer, but before long you've pretty much crafted what you wanted to and it begins to feel there's not much point continuing - it's all just bigger number equivalents of exactly where you're already at, the same gear with bigger numbers to match the same enemies with bigger numbers in faraway sectors that will feel much the same, and it's at this moment that it occurs to you that you might have found yourself on a fairly pointless grind treadmill. You wonder if "Approaching Infinity" was actually a title deliberately chosen to laugh at you as a player for wasting your time. Guess it's time to wrap things up now. OK so now this maybe sounds a tad harsh. Why do I recommend it then? Well because I think the end point of my experience was my own fault. I spent too much time min-maxing, getting ALL the pointless loot and trading to fat cat status without questioning why. Had I done what was required in each zone and moved on, stuck to a clear quest line, I don't doubt I would have had fun to one end or another rather than simply losing interest. Approaching Infinity's main flaw in my mind therefore was that it didn't make sure to light a fire under me to to help me reject my worst instinct to play in such a way as to bore myself. That's on me, sure, but a creeping threat that slowly made earlier sectors unreachable, or perhaps some more to do with big money in game, I think would have gone a long way. I recommend, just bear in mind this is an open game and it's a mistake to not keep things moving. I think if you play this title with this advice in mind, you will avoid the trap that I did.
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I bought this years ago and have played for many hours. It's a good game, but redoing the crafting makes it great. I highly recommend this game. It's not my favorite RL, but it's pretty darn close, and definitley my favorite space RL.
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If this started as TOS: The Roguelike, I wouldn't be even slightly surprised. I've lost count of the ways my brave red-shirted away teams have died. Edit, 40 hrs later: Yeah, this is rapidly becoming my favorite roguelike. Lots of ways to play, plenty of quality of life options, and the dev is amazing. The community is actively involved with future developments via the discord server, where the developer is readily available with bugfixes, answers, and regular teasing of what's in the pipeline. Updates are frequent and RARELY break saves. Crafting is finally available again after some retooling and it's a great addition, really making the Yellow division crew useful, especially the Engineer.
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Another reviewer mentioned it, but playing the demo to this felt like playing a spiritual successor to Prospector, an older traditional roguelike with a similar premise of flying around a space setting, exploring planetary surfaces, and dying to the exotic aliens that you find there. I ADORED that game, and didn't know that it died years ago until I read said review, so seeing something similar kicking around made this an instant purchase.
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I so desperately want to be James Kirk or Jean-Luc Picard, but I've been forced to accept that I'm more of a Zapp Brannigan type. "Don't be a wimp, Kiff, it's just a bit of radiation poisoning. It'll put hair on your chest!" This is very much like DCSS in a setting somewhat inspired by Star Control. It's not finished yet, I don't care if it was published as complete forever ago I still wouldn't call it finished, but it's very close and more than playable. Really, the only thing I think it needs at this point besides that UI update/makeover that's coming any day now is just more content. More weapon types, more planet types, more enemies, more loot, more options for synergies and builds, more everything. It's not that it lacks content, I'm not even close to the end yet, I just think it would be better the more it has. When the biggest complaint I have with a game I just dumped a few days into is "I wish there was even more", that's pretty good. There are a few other minor nitpicks like the realtime events feeling out of place to me, but they're barely worth mentioning. I'll re-review this once 2.0 happens and it leaves Early Access. As it stands, if you like hack and slash trad-roguelikes and you like space, you'll almost certainly like this.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 07 April 2025 16:11 |
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| Steam price | 15 April 2025 12:41 |
| Steam reviews | 13 April 2025 19:55 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Approaching Infinity, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Approaching Infinity
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Approaching Infinity concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Approaching Infinity compatibility
