Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 20221. Void Destroyer - PCVoid Destroyer is a game I backed on Kickstarter a while back and am finally getting around to playing. The elevator pitch was a space sim/FPS hybrid. Having played through it I would use the phrase "Homeworld with Urban Assault influences". It accomplishes what it sets out to, but there is a lot of amateur elements that stick out and reduced my overall enjoyment.
So let's start with that descriptor. Homeworld is a space RTS series that involved a persistent fleet across levels; you had the ability to decide when to trigger the next mission and it behooved you to make sure you built up as far as you could before doing so. Urban Assault was an RTS that had the innovative feature of letting you jump into any unit and control it directly; this would give you a passive boost to the unit's stats and allow the player to presumably handle the unit more efficiently than the CPU, with the CPU taking over everything else to act reasonably. This game merges the two concepts together; take a Homeworld base and add in being able to control any ship you own with a space sim engine with Newtonian physics and no velocity cap (though you have to opt into both and can revoke that at any time).
The story is fairly sparse, but it involves a revolt by the miners that accidentally uncovers a hostile alien force. You have a choice of endings based on how you approach things near the end of the game, and it will directly affect the forces you encounter in the final mission. The story is told through text dialog in mission and the occasional cutscene that focuses on a particular ship or structure that does a thing. These cutscenes also tend to rearrange the battlefield to bring you into threat ranges when you might have been safe otherwise, which is annoying.
Like Homeworld, you build a fleet and upgrade your flagship and these stats carry over from mission to mission. You have a cap towards the number of ships you can build in each class, but importantly this cap is only consumed when you directly build a ship in your base. If you capture an enemy ship (which is an ability your flagship has) you can go over this cap, and this ability is quite important. There are a few points where you are bereft of the support of a base, so you'll want to judiciously use the capture ability to both remove threats and augment your fleet before an upcoming major engagement. The space is fully 3D, though like Homeworld there isn't actually much advantage to be gained by taking advantage of the third dimension; the controls aren't good enough to be able to generate a proper pincer that would take advantage of enemy firing arcs. I think this is a fundamental limitation of trying to engage in 3D space using a 2D screen and a mouse; if you've ever used modeling software you know that there are a lot of tricks to get a good interface, but it also means you need a specialized skillset to really handle 3D manipulation on a screen.
Most of the time you can get by with the RTS interface, but there are a few points that you want to take advantage of being able to jump into a ship; specifically your flagship. There is a mission midway through where you need to clear static defenses with a minefield; this minefield is invisible on the map and your ships won't target mines with their point defense. You're best off taking your flagship solo, eating several mines, blowing up a turret, then bugging out and regenerating health (one of your abilities). Rinse and repeat. The second instance is in the late game; at this point you no longer can capture enemy ships and the enemy starts getting nasty, so you want to take advantage of your flagship's ability to pump out some real damage at the player helm. In this sim everything is modeled Newtonian; there is a thrust gauge for all six directions and you'll notice counter thrust being applied when you stop applying thrust so you'll come to a stop. You can turn off the automatic counter thrust which lets you do the "spin while going in one direction to do a strafe" attack. The game has no velocity cap, though by default there are safe thrusts for each unit that they don't try to exceed, as those are optimal maneuvering velocities.
The game definitely shows its status as an indie project beyond your standard slew of graphical compromises and middling UI choices. That Newtonian physics can have some hilarious results when collision occurs. There is no collision damage in game, but it can generate some insane impulses; I'm guessing due to ship geometry it applies force additively for each minor hit as part of the overall collision, with a net result that a collision can cause a ship to fly off into the void and completely beyond the bounds of the tactical map (there's a grid that only extends so far). The game allows for infinite distance (or at least MAX_INT distance), so it doesn't crash in these circumstances, but the AI doesn't handle it. Enemy ships will just hang out in deep space, and since so much of the game is trigger based on wiping out enemies you need to send a force to chase them down. In one mission they would wide up so far that I would self destruct the task force when it was done and rebuild it so they would be back for the next wave faster than if I had them fly. Another thing that stands out is the game's economy is both basic and unbalanced; only the fact the AI doesn't try to hit unit caps allows you to prevail in one mission where you are fighting against two bases. There are units that exist but are underexplored; one is a ship for capturing enemy bases, but this really only serves as an alternate to just triggering when all enemy ships are destroyed. You're not going to be able to scoop anything early, so unlike Command & Conquer's engineers there is no tactical purpose and this is just busywork. Similarly, there is a tug for moving asteroids and miners for getting additional ore from these asteroids. In one mission this is required until you can get transfers from other bases (locked by story events) and the other mission this is available it doesn't materially improve your resource situation, as you are capped by supply, not resources. With a longer game that didn't revisit the same three maps multiple times (even the dialog lampshades this) you could see more interesting considerations, like needing to send a task force to secure some asteroids without losing too much, but as it stands it just is some tedium.
Overall it's a very ambitious game for the team size, and frankly it doesn't rise to the heights it strives. It's not BAD by any stretch, but the rough edges are a bit too rough to be really enjoyable. Many of the maps end up taking too long due to how the scripts are written combined with the aforementioned bugs that artifically stretch things out. I ended up averaging almost 2 hours per mission, and that includes a couple of early missions that were 10 minutes each because you hadn't yet gotten the base and fleet stuff unlocked yet. As a first effort by an indie studio it's impressive, but taken as a "should I try this", I would say pass.