Lucardo Space Evader Review

29 January 2024

Lucardo Space Evader

We return to experience one of the best escape room companies in the north, which is Lucardo. With two hubs, Manchester & Rawtenstall, they have a tonne of challenges to keep you busy in the escape room world, as you battle to escape challenges in a live action escape room. With numerous themes, 100s of puzzles and a crafty team behind them, we take a further look into Lucardo in Manchester for our second time. 

If you want to know more regarding our first visit, where we took on their Prison Escape, click here!

Lucardo in Manchester has 7 unique rooms to explore, from horror to magic, or detective to space, they have enough themes to find something you’ll like. Games are best played in teams of 2-6 and, like all other escape rooms the challenge is to escape the setting your in by cracking clues, finding clues and following the story in order to be successful. 

Tickets are best purchased prior to attending and you select a time slot, with lots of options being available between 10am to 9:15pm on peak days. Price does vary depending on how many players and can cost anywhere from £52 to £132. You can even book multiple escape rooms at once if you reach out to the team! 

This time we chose to explore Space Evader, a space themed room. Slightly different to the other rooms we would have 75 minutes to escape, as it takes on a slightly different style of escaping. 

 

We took on Lucardo towards the end of 2023 and this was our second visit following our first ever visit in 2019. It looks they are constantly expanding and have continued with some rooms like before, meaning they must still be very popular. They have a handful of snacks and drinks to purchase if you do arrive early and as always, before you can enter the room, you have to go over some basic rules. 

Space Evader is actually a really different type of escape room, not only is it 75 minutes long, this room isn’t just about escaping. This experience does allow you to enjoy your full time in the room whilst you solve lots of different challenges. Whilst if you are good, you can probably escape in less but Space Evader requires you to get as many fuel rods as you can before the oxygen levels deplete and you have no choice but to escape. You are teamed up with the on board AI system, nicknamed Light Boi, which he may or may not help your simple task of searching and retrieving. 

We like to experience unusual escape room styles every now and again as it takes up from the generic escape as quickly as you can. For those who want a full timed game with the sense of achievement at the end, Space Evader does offer that. We believe it is perfect for groups of 4, however we believe 6 may be a little difficult in certain sections of the game however, we can see they have tried planning for that. 

Theming & Storyline – 7/10 – Space Evader has some great theming inside. With it being themed to a spaceship, it would be quite hard to go wrong. It had plenty of tech and unusual artifacts, plenty of funky lights and the grunge feeling of what you would expect in a spaceship. Everything you interact with didn’t feel out of place and the narrow corridors and walkways worked perfectly. Using green rods as fuel sticks felt believable and kept you immersed that you was on a space mission. The story given at the start set the tone and as you progressed, the simplicity of it meant you knew what the end goal was, which was collecting as many fuel rods as possible before the oxygen was gone. 

Puzzles & Flow – 10/10 – Where do we start on the puzzles as there was so many. Some were easy and some had so many clever steps within which made them some of the hardest we’ve seen. Some required patience whilst others required speed and dexterity. It was great to see such a wide range of puzzles to collect the fuel rods in here, meaning you have that sense of achievement when you do find out how to solve one of the puzzles. Everything felt like a puzzle at some points, as there was just hidden clues and objects everywhere. The flow therefore was top tier, as if you couldn’t solve something, you could leave it and find something else to do. This with the variety of puzzles make the game one of the best in this field. 

Uniqueness – 8/10 – As we have already said with it being a 75 minute experience plus it isn’t about solving it quickly to escape in under this time, the objective is all about collecting the fuel rods. This simple feature makes it stand out as not many experience offer this kind of style. Whilst we have no idea how many we collected (we forgot), we do know we missed so many!

Therefore Space Evaders is one of the best escape rooms we have played in 2023. We loved the style, the puzzles and how the theme & story came together to create a fun yet challenging mission. What we do love is that Lucardo can take generic themes such as a prison or space and make them better than you can imagine. When themes like space are used pretty often, it is great to see different takes on the escape room environment and push it to a unique level of play compared to the rest. Space Evaders is just simply a great game, where 75 minutes just flies by, quite literally.

A huge thank you to the team at Lucardo for allowing us to experience Space Evader with them, they provided the experience complimentary in return for our review and photos. Unfortunately no video this time as we didn’t want to spoil the mysteries within and we would highly recommend you check them out when in Manchester.

Have you played any of Lucardo’s games before? Let us know on our socials if so…

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