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As a remake of an old game Space HoRSE is nearly perfect. If that’s all you want, then you’ll be thrilled with the game.

What is a M.U.L.E.?

If you know the answer, or even if it simply sparks some long forgotten memory from your youth, then Space HoRSE is a game that you’ll instantly be familiar with.

A modern incarnation of the old Electronic Arts game M.U.L.E., Space HoRSE is a competently crafted and completely faithful remake. Perhaps a little too faithful, as ultimately you’ll question whether there truly was a need for a modern M.U.L.E..

The object of the game is fairly straightforward. You and three others (human, computer, or combination — there are always four players in a game) have arrived at a new planet, ripe for colonization. Over the course of one year (with each turn representing one month) you and the others must develop the strange world, producing resources to buy and sell at auctions. At the end of twelve turns whoever has profited the most takes top honors.

Each turn consists of several phases. The first phase is claiming land. The playing field consists of forty-five squares, arranged in a nine by five grid on an attractive looking map. On this grid you will claim land and use HoRSEs to develop the land.

There are three types of plots to claim: river, plains, and mountainous. Each of these is beneficial to producing certain resources. River plots are good for food production, the plains help you with power, and mountainous terrain is good for titanium. There is also one more resource to be found, zirconium, a precious gem. Power and food are basic necessities, while titanium and zirconium tend to be the commodities that fetch the nicest price (not that food and power can’t fetch a good price when the other players run low on them).

Each player takes turn claiming a single plot of land each turn, the order dictated by how the players currently rank. Carefully choosing the proper plots is an essential part of the overall game strategy. Sometimes you’ll want to pick a plot that you may not want, but perhaps someone else does. After the land claim phase is up land can be put up for sale, thus allowing you to make a tidy little profit off that land you didn’t want but someone else did.

The next phase sees the players actually developing their land. You can purchase HoRSEs (the acronym stands for Holistic Robotic Slave Engineer), the equivalent of M.U.L.E.s (which stood for Multiple Use Labor Element, a tad bit more clever of a name) in the original game, and plop them down on your claimed land. Each HoRSE has a different function, allowing you to either farm, produce power, mine for titanium, or dig for zirconium. HoRSEs are not permanent, so you can always move them around if you want to change what a plot produces.

Besides using HoRSEs you may survey for good zirconium plots, trade with human players, or place some of your land up for auction. All of this is done under a steadily dwindling timer, which is also effected by if you have enough food (starve and the timer starts off with very little time on it). When time runs out your turn is over, regardless of whether you’ve accomplished everything you had planned. This is another reason why plots should be chosen with care, as you will have to physically move your HoRSEs across the landscape. Own land too far away from the starting point and you may not even have enough time to place your HoRSE.

After all four players go through this production occurs. Each cultivated plot will yield a random number of resources dependent on what type of HoRSE was installed on the land. Random events can also occur at this point, such as volcanoes erupting and making a plot useless, or space pirates plundering the zirconium.

The last phase in a turn is the market phase. It is here that players buy and sell their resources, either to the other players or to the warehouse. Buying and selling is very easy to understand. Buyers stay at the bottom of the screen, sellers on top. The current price each is offering is represented by a horizontal line, which is pushed up or down by the player’s input. When the buyer and seller’s lines converge a price is agreed upon. Each of the four resources is bid upon and once that is done the turn’s score is computed. If it’s the twelfth turn the game ends (with no fanfare), otherwise the game proceeds to the next turn and you do it all over.

And that’s Space HoRSE. Every game lasts twelve turns. Every game has four players. Every game has forty-five plots of land. Every game has the same four resources. There are some random events that do shake up the game, but often they’re unbalanced, helping or hindering a player in a very extreme manner.

Now, if you do recall M.U.L.E. you’re probably going, “So? That’s what M.U.L.E. was like and it rocked!” Yes, you’re right, Space HoRSE is a carbon copy of M.U.L.E, but does it rock? Not really.

Nostalgia is a funny thing. M.U.L.E. is remembered as a classic for a handful of reasons. One of these reasons was that it was considered to be rather addictive at the time. Folks, Space Invaders was considered addictive once upon a time. It was a simpler era. Viewed today the gameplay of M.U.L.E. was fun, but nowhere near a classic.

The reasons that really made the game stand apart from the pack included its theme and the number of players involved. M.U.L.E. was a game where you won through money, not by killing endless hordes of bad guys. A nonviolent computer game was a novelty. Also a novelty was the fact that four people could play on the same machine, something unheard of at the time. It was a game that you could play with a bunch of your friends on a rainy Saturday afternoon, wheeling and dealing, and generally having a lot of fun.

What was innovative back then is nowhere near as innovative today. You can play games with dozens of people now, and some of the top selling games are nonviolent in nature. Economic games are also rather common, such as the excellent Capitalism series.

As a remake of an old game Space HoRSE is nearly perfect. If that’s all you want, then you’ll be thrilled with the game. If you’re looking for a fresh take on the original game though it’s hard not to be disappointed. So much more could have been done. The game could have been expanded in any number of ways, yet still retain the spirit of M.U.L.E. Instead, you have a game that is stuck in a time warp.

Reviewed by Scott R Krol.