By Jim Rossignol on August 12th, 2009 at 8:07 am.
Nolan Bushnell, the Old Man Of The Mountain Of Videogames, whom we saw chat to a crowd in London recently, has put his name to a new, free TPS/FPS/RTS hybrid game: Battleswarm: Field of Honor. I know! Here’s the lowdown: “Battleswarm allows up to six players to take control of soldiers in team-based, first- or third-person shooter mode, arming themselves from a huge arsenal of high-tech weapons and armor. They compete in discrete missions versus up to four Alien Commanders, who control hundreds of bug-like units in real-time strategy mode. The Alien Commanders must build hives, breed units, and manage their forces in missions to overwhelm the human opponents. Players can create guilds, buy and sell items, and level up their characters.” The game has a rather strong Starship Trooper vibe, with armoured space-types fighting large, insectile bugs. You can check it out in the rather poor-quality trailer below. But we can better than that: the beta is already in progress, so you can go sign up. I’ll have a crack at it later and see if I can come up with some useful impressions.
12/08/2009 at 08:26 Stromko says:
I’m intrigued, I’ll sign up and see what’s what.
The FPS vs RTS bit reminds me of Iron Grip: The Oppression, except with 4 alien commanders instead of 1 oppressor commander there should be less risk of an idiot or griefer spoiling the whole round by taking that one slot.
12/08/2009 at 08:26 Baka says:
Anything that reminds me of Natural Selection has to be tried out! Downloading right now…
12/08/2009 at 08:48 Matt says:
Looks Interesting, reminds me of Lost Planet. Am downloading it now.
12/08/2009 at 09:07 Owen says:
How the hell is that free?! Will sign up and check it out. Cheers
12/08/2009 at 10:02 Howard says:
Worth a punt. Downloading now for a look-see
12/08/2009 at 10:37 Dominic White says:
@Owen – It’s free with cash-shop, so it’s not entirely devoid of monetary input, but hopefully they’ll play it smart and make the purchasables cosmetic and/or convenience stuff (as the better semi-free games do it), rather than straight upgrades.
It does look like an interesting idea though. Here’s hoping it plays well.
12/08/2009 at 10:52 Matt says:
Played for 30minutes or so, Graphics arent great, but very fun for a free game. Strange concept with guns as you purchase the time to use them e.g. a gatling gun for 10 days etc. But definately worth a try.
12/08/2009 at 11:04 Dominic White says:
Just played a quick match, and yeah, it’s actually quite impressive for a free game. My one gripe is that I can’t seem to find any kind of Invert Y axis option for the mouse, but I pride myself on being adaptable, so it’s no big deal.
12/08/2009 at 11:17 Owen says:
Ah I see, cheers Dominic. Will be downloading this tonight.
12/08/2009 at 11:39 Howard says:
Okay, well check that. Won’t be playing this as the setup only detects two non-widescreen resolutions: 1024×768 and 800×600.
What. The. Fuck?
12/08/2009 at 12:06 Dominic White says:
Weird – it identifies all of my monitors supported resolutions. I’m running quite happily at 1440 x 900.
Well, this is a beta – tell them the problem, and hope it gets fixed.
12/08/2009 at 12:17 Howard says:
I’m guessing that’s ‘cos your *is* a widescreen monitor maybe?
Odd to have an issue with normal aspect ratio and widescreen support for a change lol
12/08/2009 at 12:21 Howard says:
Hmmm, also it looks unlikely it will get fixed. The forums are a ghost town and there is no other way to provide feedback.
File this under “amateur hour” and move on me thinks…
12/08/2009 at 12:23 Tei says:
Sounds a bit like Sacrifice multiplayer :-)
12/08/2009 at 12:48 Dominic White says:
Seems that there’s actually quite a few clever design decisions in this. To heal, marines have to play a risky game, and pick up the glowing blue crystals that aliens drop. This’ll get you random health/armor/loot. However, the bug players can call down slightly delayed artillery strikes anywhere on the map – that big pile of crystals that a wounded marine is running to is a very good target. I’ve been caught out by this a few times.
Also, you get Bug upgrades when playing as Marines, and Marine upgrades when playing as Bugs, so to progress you need to alternate between the two games.
12/08/2009 at 17:24 Savage Designer says:
Looks like Savage 2
12/08/2009 at 19:03 Player2 says:
@Dominic- Ooh, that sounds incredibly intuitive. I recall I only ever played as humans in games such as Tremulous or Natural Selection as I found shooting things more fun, but now I’ll be forced to play as some bugs so my marine can be the buff badass he should be :D
12/08/2009 at 19:05 Player2 says:
Yar, double post. I blame the lack of edit buttons :P
@Savage- How does it look ANYTHING like Savage 2?
12/08/2009 at 20:05 Savage Designer says:
its a RTS/FPS/Action frankenstein. But this incarnation has less guns, looks like.
They need to release Savage 3.
13/08/2009 at 00:05 Dominic White says:
Okay, I can say this: This is actual beta testing. It isn’t ‘pre-release demo with everything active’. They seem to have disabled a lot of features, and are going through things one by one to test them out. At the moment, they’re bombarding people with seasonal (easter, christmas, valentines) quests to see if they work.
The equipment/creature upgrade systems are currently disabled, and loot drops seem downright weird at the moment, so I don’t think we can really judge the final gameplay based on this.
13/08/2009 at 01:06 a says:
Of the two download links, one’s timing out for me and one won’t go faster than 30 kbps. Shame, this looks like fun. I guess I’m waiting for it to finish,
13/08/2009 at 18:45 Snakebite says:
This game is alright, granted it is still in beta.