Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator Review for Xbox Series S/X

When I started writing for Gaming Cypher a year and a half ago, I have to say I never expected to be writing a review for a game called Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator. Even more so, I never expected to get hooked from the moment I opened up the 16-bit alien stock trading window or to look up at the clock and realize that 2 hours had suddenly gone by. Yes, it’s that addicting.

I won’t waste any time getting to the details, because this game has one of the wildest premises I’ve ever seen. Somewhere in an alien solar system, “FutureSee” terminals are able to provide limited glances into future events, which have both good effects (advancing medicine, stopping wars) and bad effects (investment markets plummet). The only thing these advanced terminals can’t accurately predict? People’s life trajectories. And so, the “baby trading” market has exploded in popularity as the one remaining form of investment.

You start with a set amount of money and a single planet to choose from; as you progress through the campaigns, you unlock new characters and new locations. After paying the entrance fee, you pick a baby and begin buying and selling stocks as a simulation rapidly takes you through their major life events. The babies’ lives are tailored to the planet they grow up on—an agricultural planet could have events related to crop fires and seed lawsuits, while a hardscrabble military world has events like deployment to the front lines and losing your hearing in one ear. As with the real-life stock market, the goal is to buy low and sell high, and before long you begin to develop a canny sixth sense for the direction a baby’s life is heading. There’s a tiny delay or so between an event displaying and the effect it has on the stock, giving you a precious split-second or so to buy or sell. As the game goes on, you start to become more savvy as to whether an event will have a positive or negative effect on the stock.

If that sounds like an incredibly dark premise, it is—the game even offers a disclaimer before you start to take a break from playing if you start to feel uncomfortable. And yet, it’s very funny in its bleak absurdity, offering a black-comedy vision of an alien future full of wild, wicked characters. The babies’ life trajectory is in no way guaranteed at the beginning, and that’s part of the fun—a baby that aces all of their classes and graduates college early could take an unexpected dive into drug addiction and lose all their money, and a baby that suffers from a childhood illness that tanks their stock price can turn their life around and become hugely successful. It’s actually a bit of a misnomer to call them “babies,” since you follow their entire lives, only the very beginning of which is spent as a baby—and some live for hundreds of years!

Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator started off as a PC game and was recently ported to Xbox on March 26^th. The graphics are intentionally old-school, resembling a 16-bit computer terminal like you’re trading on Wall Street in the 1990s. There’s a learning curve to be sure, and I spent several campaigns losing an absolute fortune before I got the hang of it and started making money, but you can restart a failed campaign whenever you want. The more campaigns you complete, the more you unlock – and, of course, the more money you invest, the more you stand to win (or lose). As someone who knows almost nothing about investing in the real stock market, it didn’t take long for me to grasp the mechanics.

Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator is an absolutely wild ride, and I love it. I highly recommend it for gamers who like sci-fi, strategy, and a healthy dose of dark comedy. It’s definitely a challenge, and you can expect to fail a lot before you start to succeed, but don’t be surprised if you end up sinking hours and hours into this game without realizing.

Score: 9/10

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Ian Robinson-Lambert

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I've loved video games ever since I started playing Mario Kart on my parents' Wii back in seventh grade. These days, you can find me playing a mix of historical RPGs and horror (shout-out to Assassin's Creed and Resident Evil). I also love a good puzzle, and of course I still have a soft spot for the Super Mario series!