14 DAY TRIAL // I like space games a lot, mostly due to having played an unhealthy amount of Master of Orion and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. That is why, whenever I see a handful of screenshots showing ships battling on a starry canvas, my whole brain lights up.
The latest such event occurred when I saw Distant Star: Revenant Fleet. The game offers an interesting mix of real time tactics gameplay and roguelike elements, set in a dynamically generated galaxy with a ton of random events.
The game is currently on Steam Early access, and from the outside, it looked pretty promising. Neat-looking ships to control in space, flashy combat and strategic decisions, and an inevitable rinse and repeat mechanic.
That to me sounded just peachy, since there are times when starting up a new game of Civilization V feels like a chore, and a science fiction themed, small-scale video game would fit that niche just fine.
The game puts you in charge of a ship, drops you into combat, and then you get more ships and go to a different sector and enter combat again, and so on and so forth, until your inevitable demise.
When you get splattered across the background, you have to start all over again, due to the roguelike nature of the game, only with a better understanding of its systems and greater odds of succeeding.
It's like a more complex FTL
Gameplay is fun, and due to the slower pace of space combat and long mission times, a single run can easily take you a few hours to complete. Fortunately, you can save and exit between missions without incurring any penalty, and the game can be paused at any time indefinitely.
Pausing also allows you to analyze your current situation, take a look at the opposing forces, and plan out your attack plan, performing wide maneuvers or subtle alterations such as closing in on a nearby allied ship in order for it to be within healing range.
You can recruit more ships into your fleet, and each of them has some base statistics such as hit points and shield points, specific weapon loadouts, and special abilities such as restoring a portion of a ship's hull.
When you reach each new sector, you get a random event, ranging from surprise enemy attack to finding a rogue section of your own faction, or a derelict space station, and you get several courses of action to choose from.
Although you are able to weasel your way out of confrontations a lot of times, there are occasions on which even the most peaceful spacefarer has to resort to shooting colorful lasers at an aggressor, and the real-time tactics system is pretty fun.
Battles are very static, everyone just stands around and shoots their stuff, until one of the parties is no more. The difficulty comes mostly from the superior enemy forces, which compensate for your superior tactics.
Each ship has a shield that, once broken, can be reactivated after 30 seconds, introducing a nice paradigm where you have to rotate the ship taking the brunt of enemy damage depending on its shield and keep an eye out for enemies doing the same.
Ship battles require a lot of attention and timing
Whenever you do crack an enemy's shield, it's a good idea to focus fire and take it down within that window, in order not to lose precious time and open yourself to even more enemy firepower.
You can also semi-customize your ships between missions, if you're lucky enough to find upgrades and new modules, and whenever your ships level up.
Each time you successfully complete a sector's mission, your surviving ships get an experience point, and the destroyed ones are healed up but receive a critical damage token, impairing their ability to function at their fullest.
This works as a fun way to make combat engaging and to make you care about your ships, without punishing you too harshly if you fail.
The visuals are pretty and crisp and the randomly generated sectors make it fun and interesting to play, offering a ton of replayability, but also frustration when that badly needed repair station stays elusive.
The gameplay mechanics so far seem great, the arena-style combat is very engaging, and Distant Star: Revenant Fleet seems like a game with a ton of potential.
