the steam summer sale is live

[KamenRiderzero1]

I took the Bethesda bundle that was around $65.

 

i've also decided I'm going record myself playing the older games from that bundle with no preparation and see how far I get before I get a Game Over.

starting with the the FPS that made the genera, "Wolfenstien 3D".

 

[HebaruSan]

Brief summer sale game review: Interplanetary

It's a "Scorched Earth" clone wearing a KSP skin. The playing field is a solar system in which each player controls a planet, and the goal is to bombard your enemies into oblivion. The orbital mechanics look superficially nice (and notably N-body instead of patched conics) but are extensively faked for gameplay reasons. E.g., if you fire a projectile at an enemy planet on a Hohmann transfer, it gets there within one turn, during which the planets move only a few tens of degrees in their orbits. Similarly, each turn appears to last a few weeks based on the orbital distances covered, but the attacks you can launch are controlled by your weapons' orientation at a single instant in time (waiting a few hours for the planet's rotation to align your other laser isn't an option). And while projections of future orbital paths are shown, they only consider the current positions of the planets. You can feel like a planetary defense force, but don't hope to experience how it would "really" work.

The non-orbital elements of the game are fun enough but not particularly novel. You build mines and power plants on your planet to generate resources. To see targets on enemy planets, you need to build telescopes, which they can counter by building anti-telescope buildings. There are several kinds of weapons with different pros and cons. A conventional tech tree unlocks access to buildings and building upgrades. Each player starts with 5 cities that act like your hit points, lose them all and it's game over.

Overall, the gameplay feels slightly incomplete. You can't build new cities, so you can circumvent the telescope arms race by getting one look at the enemy's cities and memorizing their locations. There are non-inhabited planetoids, but you can't build bases on them, so all they do is make aiming a bit more gravitationally complicated. There's no mechanic for diplomacy or alliances that I could find. The UI could use some polish. But it was still fun to try to hit planets with missiles while scrambling to build up an industrial base and balance offense against defense.

Edited July 3, 2017 by HebaruSan

[StupidAndy]

2 hours ago, HebaruSan said:

Brief summer sale game review: Interplanetary

I've been eyeing that for a few months

it might be incomplete, but worth a buy?

[HebaruSan]

44 minutes ago, StupidAndy said:

I've been eyeing that for a few months

it might be incomplete, but worth a buy?

For $7.50, sure. And supposedly they're still updating it, so it might get better.

[Mjp1050]

Well, um... this seems like a pretty good deal...

 

[StupidAndy]

1 hour ago, Mjp1050 said:

Well, um... this seems like a pretty good deal...

 

yeah...well It could be better, like, maybe 100% off...

[Mjp1050]

Just now, StupidAndy said:

yeah...well It could be better, like, maybe 100% off...

What, 12 bucks for a $150 product isn't good enough for you?