Speaking of quests, so far they’ve been pretty varied. I’ve had to do everything from safely ferry a diplomat to helping terraform a planet to making a system more safe for interstellar travel, and a bunch in-between. Quests are the cheese that keep this mouse moving forward, and they help keep the gameplay focused. I mean sure, you could simply fly around systems and kill bad guys, but quests are the real spice of the game.

Where do you get quests? The other empires, of course, again either remotely or in person. Quests give nice experience and monetary bonuses, and they’re also a great way to gain favor with these empires. Any game of Drox Operative can have multiple empires (currently my game has three active empires), and you can work with or against these empires as you see fit. The empires have relations with each other (which you can help or hinder with rumors and such) as well as relations with you personally, and lots of things can affect your relations. Besides quests, you can improve relations by trading with planets, killing enemies near their forces and so on. If you don’t care to improve relations, you can actually declare war on a faction. I’ve not done this, but I can’t say I recommend it.

I don’t recommend it because you’ll need the colonized planets of these empires to not only repair and recharge your ship and its components, but to do one of the most fun things in the game, go shopping! Each planet in Drox Operative has a varied selection of ship upgrades, such as engines, weapons and ancillary equipment. Your ship has certain amount of light, medium and heavy slots, and certain pieces of equipment can only fit in these specific slots. This makes shopping for upgrades a bit confusing, but one gets used to it.

Shopping for equipment has one main reason…to improve your ship’s stats. While your character has specific stats (as does your crew, which we’ll talk about in a moment), ships also have their own stats that are dictated by its equipment, such as how much energy it has or how quickly it recharges its energy reserves, how much attack and defense power, how fast it moves and so on. The stats of your ship and your crew can also affect which equipment you can purchase.​