I've played around a bit with Galcon Labs before I finally sat down to play the whole thing, and the concept seemed really cool to me. Each level is a field of planets. You control a few of the planets, which will be in your color. The enemy also controls some planets, represented in their color. These planets (those controlled by a either you or the enemy) have a number on them indicating how many ships are stationed there. This number goes up as more ships are produced on the planet. The bigger the planet is, the faster it produces ships. There are also many neutral planets, which are gray. They have a number indicating how many ships you need to send there to conquer them. The object is to wipe out all traces of your enemy before they do the same to you.
The controls are as follows: the d-pad acts as a cursor that jumps from planet to planet. You can hold down circle to make the cursor only jump between enemy planets or cross to make it only select your planets (I never really used this). To attack, you need to select a planet or planets you control. You can chooses them one at a time by pressing R1 while they are highlighted, or select all planets you control with L1. There is no way to un-highlight a planet once it is picked except to attack. You then pick a neutral or enemy planet to attack. You put the cursor over it and press square to send 50% of the ships from your planet(s) or triangle to send 100%. As soon as you press the button, ships launch from all of your planets and head to their target. Once there, each of your ships takes out one of the ships docked at the planet, and vice versa. So you need to send more ships than the number on the planet in order to conquer it. Once a planet hits 0, it changes to your color and the rest of your ships dock there, filling it up with the number that land. Keep in mind that the enemy is doing this same process at the same time, and all non neutral planets are constantly going up in number. These matches only take a minute or two.
The visuals in the games are pretty sparse. The planets all have irregular surfaces, which look like cratering, like the surface of the moon. The backgrounds are basic space stills; they look ok. The ships themselves are literally just triangles. This is actually pretty cool. It doesn't sound like much, but it all works pretty well visually, and there isn't any slowdown even when things get crazy.
The first thing to do is the campaign, which quickly runs you through the different types of stages. There are Classic stages, which are just like I described previously. In Crash stages, opposing fleets can crash into and destroy one another while in transit. This is cool, but doesn't seem to have much effect on the winner or loser. The casualties just happen in space instead of at a planet. In Assassin matches there are two enemies. You need to take out a specific one to win. Your target wins if it takes out the other enemy, and that enemy is gunning for you. In Billiards matches, the planets are in motion and bounce off of one another. The final type of match is Stealth, where enemy fleets become invisible shortly after launching so that you can't see where they are going. After a few stages of campaign mode, enemy planet numbers all become an X, forcing you to estimate their strength. And then you are done. Campaign mode only took me about an hour. Most of the stages are too easy, although a handful of them were quite challenging.
Next up is Fusion mode, where you choose a game type from the five I listed above and a difficulty. There are 10 difficulty levels, which is really weird. You then are thrown onto a random map. As in the later campaign stages, enemy forces are represented by an X, so you have to guess how many ships are at any given planet. Win or lose, you can chooses to restart the map you played or go on to a new map. You can also request a new map while the game is paused if you want to restart with a new layout. If you win, you get awarded points based on how fast you were, what difficulty you chose, and how hard the type of match you choose to play is. When you earn enough points, you gain different ranks. This mode is fun for a bit. I played about 2 hours of it, mainly playing Billiards and Assassin on the mid to high level difficulties. I even had a few victories on the highest difficulty, “Don't Try.” Assassin and Billiards are the most engaging battle types to me. Billiards shows you just how important positioning is. Attacking nearby planets is key as you waste time if your fleet is traveling across the entire screen. This is important in other modes, but is highlighted when the planets are all moving around. Assassin is really fun. Depending on the difficulty you are playing you need to try and let the enemy that isn't your target take some of your planets so that your target doesn't win or try to survive the 2nd enemy aggressively attacking you.
The music is really good. There are six songs by my count, one for the campaign and one for each type of Fusion match. They are all cool space electronic music. Very nice.
This game is fun and interesting, but something's not right. If you're doing the math, you'll notice that I only played it for about 3 hours. I had some fun, but lost interest after that. Different maps do make each game a little different, but my main strategy of making all my planets attack the weakest large neutral planets and then attacking the closest large enemy planets soon became routine. In Assassin matches, all I would do is press L1 to highlight all my planets and then send all my ships after the closest target enemy planet. Some interesting things would happen and sometimes the plan would go wrong and need to be altered, but in general I stuck to that plan once I got used to things. I feel like a big part of the reason I developed these strategies is that picking single planets to attack is so time consuming as to be not worth doing. If you were controlling the game with a mouse or touch controls (there is an iOS version, I hear), this would be much simpler, but as it is, you can't win matches by slowing moving the cursor to one planet and then over to another and back again. This might work if the cursor would snap back to your planet after an attack, but even that would be super clunky. It's often necessary to quickly move the cursor to the target planet while pressing L1 to select all of your planets. This is because of the control scheme, not necessarily because it is the best strategy. The controls shouldn't dictate the way you strategize in this manner.
I also want to complain about the way you get a bunch of options at the end of the each level, but can't actually pick them until the game auto-saves. You just sit there, wondering if the game has frozen as you foolishly press the button over and over.
I also wish there was multiplayer. I feel like it would be amazing and strategies would develop that this game's AI could never utilize. Assassin would be so cool in multiplayer.
The game is interesting enough that I might look into some other games that play like this, such as Mushroom Wars and Planets Under Attack. This game has some fun times. Probably about half of my brief time with it was pretty engaging. That's not much time though. That's why it's a mediocre game, tier 3.
No comments:
Post a Comment