Thanks to Gamespot.com, I've recently discovered another Indie gem in Subset Games' FTL: Faster Than Light. The game is a mix of Serenity and Star Trek with your motley band of space farers fighting pirates, collecting scrap and surviving through the battles and text encounters you face.
The game consists of choosing a starting ship, naming it and your crew and setting off with a message of vital importance to the federation. What the message is, I have no idea, but it's vitally important so me and my crew better get moving. When you start the game (and in each subsequent system) you are confronted with a collection of stars you can jump to. Each jump leads to a text based message and often a choice of help, fight or flee as you approach the exit to the next system. This is combined with a system of upgrading your ship and improving your weaponry and an improving crew which leads to an engaging brand of short burst gameplay. The graphics are presented in a blocky 16-bit style and most of your time will be spent looking at a plan view of your ship as your crew get to work.
This is a simplistic explanation of a deceptively difficult game. Death means a restart of the whole journey, not just a return to an earlier save which, whilst frustrating at times, adds tension in a world of infinite respawns and no lose gaming. An average game lasts anything from 10 minutes to an hour or so and restarts are quick after a long journey through space ending in a terrible disaster because of an angry mercenary or a broken oxygen creator.
The game does at times get a little samey and, in spite of the developers arguments about 25000 lines of text, I found most of the mini-stories basically the same. This is a little trite though, like saying Tetris was a bit repetitive. Of course it was but something about the core gameplay is compelling with enough choice and new upgrades to make you feel like a commander of a starship.
I was driven to think of some of the most enjoyable times I had in Mass Effect whilst simply interacting with my crew (no, not like that you with your dirty mind). I found the characters in Mass Effect often engaging and enjoyed building the time spend building relationships with the ship and the games cast some of the more engaging sections. FTL manages to capture much of that heart in an indie way. Sure your little self-named crew are given less character by the writers as they run around the little ship but the story you can build is an often compelling one.
There is a bit of me that wonders if this sort of gameplay could work in a AAA or perhaps Live Arcade/PSN quality title. With a bigger team and a few tweaks could this have mass appeal or would it simply be lost in a world of big budget titles.
I've wanted a game that is more about the journey than the goal for quite some time and FTL manages to go a little way to doing that. After all, life isn't about where you end up, it's about how you get there.
The Good
- A bargain price tag of £6.99 (UK) or $9.99 (US)
- Compelling core gameplay that keeps you coming back for more.
- No game has made you feel more like Captain Kirk or Mal Reynolds.
The Bad
- Slightly repetitive scenarios.
- Would benefit from a bigger storyline or more longer quests.
In a very short update to an earlier posting about Project Zomboid by The Indie Stone, good news all around as the game has been Greenlit by Steam to launch on the platform.
In a short post on their site, the developers thanked the fans for getting it through the Greenlight scheme and for all their support. They do warn however, that it's a long road ahead to getting it released on Steam but I'll keep my eyes peeled.
I think the game is clearly an enjoyable and engaging game and look forward to a Steam supported version.
See my earlier write up here.
For the last few days I've been satisfying my wait for The Walking Dead Episode 2 by playing a little indie game called Project Zomboid by Indie Stone. The version I have been playing is the current 'full release' of version 0.15d which is several months old and is soon to be replaced by version 0.2r which addresses some of the issues I faced (if this is the case then I have not included any gripes about it here). I can't claim to be an expert on this game having played for a length of time in low double digit hours but have tried to get a taste of much of what is available at present and some of what is to come.
The game itself is about survival; plain and simple. It challenges you to tell the story of your own death in the game world. There is no pretence that you can 'win', you simply last as long as you can. I guess a little like Tetris in that respect, you'll never finish it, simply increase the delaying of your inevitable flesh chompy death. In order to help you survive you have a deceptively detailed crafting mechanic to help you. You can use planks and nails to board up windows and doors, you can chop down doors to get planks, you can use sheets to make bandages and to cover windows and so on. There is plenty of food to eat although some of this spoils and goes off if you don't do anything with it and can be combined with other things to be cooked. The player has some simple 'moodlets' that let you know if your character is tired, hungry, scared, sick, wet etc. This allows you to carry out actions accordingly.
There is a basic introductory story mode that includes a nicely tense lead in to the game and some good character introduction with a shotgun toting psychopath. The true heart of the game however lies in its sandbox mode. The opportunity to choose from a small set of similar player characters, choosing some skills from a skill tree and surviving for as long as you can is thrillling for a number of play throughs. Do you want to sacrifice being overweight to have the bonus of strength or hard of hearing to have the bonus of great sight but remember, when you're dead, you're dead! No save points! No chance to try again so you better not make a mistake or it's game over for good.
My personal longest survival was a fraught affair, holed up in a house with as much food as I could muster early on. All the windows sheeted over and spiked baseball bat in hand I even managed to hold out through a few days with a sickness and fever. The problems came as food (and Whiskey) began to run low after a dozen days and I needed to venture in to nearby houses for supplies. On reaching a warehouse the goods were too good to turn down and I overstocked. Weighed down by a shotgun, stacks of food and gas canisters progress home was slow and I was caught out in the open at night. Even an expertly crafted Molotov Cocktail in their midst wasn't enough to hold off the drooling hoards of flesh-eaters and I was destined to be starting again.
The crafting system is still limited in what you can create. There are bugs and crashes early on. The graphics and moodlets are reminiscent of The Sims from 12 years ago. But it's unfair to judge Project Zomboid for its flaws as it is clearly in its early stages with big plans for growth. Playing like The Sims meets Left 4 Dead, if Indie Stone can apply some polish there is clearly a diamond here waiting to be discovered.
The Project Zomboid community looks as if it's thriving with tens of thousands of views of posts in the company's own forums and an impressive 11,000+ likes of the company's Facebook page. Even celebrity gamer Graham Linehan is a fan. It's certainly a community and a game that I will be keeping a close eye on in the coming months and years to see what they can do with this with more and more input. Is it possible that this could become the next Minecraft and go big? I say, why not? This is doing something that I haven't seen anywhere else and clearly there is a desire for what Indie Stone are doing. Whether the core of the game will be able to be kept as the game becomes more popular and there is more call for casual features to be added will be interesting to see. Whilst some sort of ability to save and return is a necessity, I for one hope that we don't see too many more casual friendly features added as the fear of death is the mechanic that keeps tension in each playthrough.
If you want to know more you can find the game at http://projectzomboid.com/
