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| Tenative thumbs down (unless I'm missing something?) by FABIO 10/08/2009, 11:39pm PDT | ||||
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| It doesn't seem so much like a tower defense game as one of those old vibrating football tables where you hope your players shake to the other side. Set up your pieces which doesn't matter much since they'll just shake apart randomly and bump into each other anyway, then flip the on switch and pray.
There are plenty of ship/module balance issues, but they don't even register against the big picture. The real problems are control and feedback. As far as control goes, you spend a big chunk of your time trying to juggle through pre-battle voodoo AI commands and you'll still never get even a fraction of basic RTS functionality. Flanking is nearly out of the question, you must go through the TANK TANK TANK ships before you can get to the rear NUKE NUKE NUKE fragile torpedo frigates. This wouldn't be much of a problem if it drew on the strengths of tower defense games: an ongoing puzzle of increasing pressure demanding thinking reflexes. That's sunk by the lack of any meaningful feedback. You get almost zero information on what enemy ships are armed with. Are those projectiles torpedoes, missiles, plasma, or decoys? Are those rays beams or lasers? Are his fighters not dying because they're too fast for me to hit or because their armor is absorbing everything? Beyond rare standout effects like ECM beams, you can't tell what you are or were up against with mounds of guesswork that borders on forensics, followed by time consuming retry after retry to see which module finally breaks through the enemy's completely hidden stats. Hiding everything isn't a cerebral challenge; it just turns it all into time consuming trial & error. Imagine a tower defense game with hundreds of possible enemy types with only a big question mark to represent every one. It's up to YOU to figure out which wave is which by trying to study which one of your dozens of towers damages them, except the health bars are hidden too. Sit through the 5-10 minute battle playback and try to spot the tells. There's no way to speed up the playback beyond 4x (not fast enough) or just auto-resolve, and the lack of a rewind button means you have to restart if you miss something. Imagine an MMO where you never saw enemy lifebars, damage results, or lasting effects. Why couldn't you have real time control? Or turn based? Why couldn't you purchase ships and have them warp in throughout the battle like a tower defense game so it could be more than a non-interactive playback? Why can't you see the enemy ships' modules or at least their life bars? It could have been a great little mini-RTS. It could have been turn based game that rendered Master of Orion forever obsolete (but not the delightful tax forms of Gal Civ 2). It could have been a great tower defense game. Instead it's none of those. You honestly spend two-thirds of the time trying to reverse engineer information that should be readily available in the first place and the other 50% on trying to set up formations & commands that the AI won't completely fuck up. It needs a major reworking. It's not interactive enough to qualify as a strategy game, and too pointlessly obtuse to pass as a puzzle game. Pick one and go with it. |
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