This morning I woke up to a nice surprise as Slitherine sent out a call looking for beta testers for Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy, a game about 3D tactical space battles. Even though many of you will be sold just from that short description, let me expand on it a bit. SHVP came out last June for the PC to pretty strong reviews overall. The game has you playing a branching story campaign with over 60 missions or creating your own skirmish scenarios. From what I’ve heard, the story is pretty well-written and interesting, which is a rare find in non-story focused games recently.
The battles, since most of us play space battle games for the battle part of them, are “pausable real-time" where you give commands to your units in the planning phase, watch your orders executed in real time for ten seconds, and then plan your moves again (similar to games like Frozen Synapse). The battles are highly strategic since notions like flanking and unit positioning are quite crucial to your victory.
Your army consists of various types of ships – Raiders, Corvettes, Frigates, and so on – each with its own fit-out and function and each with its own energy core that you can adjust to give your ship either stronger shields, higher weapon power, or greater speeds. Your flagship’s crew members have their own distinct personalities that you’ll have to manage in order to improve your ships’ morale. As you can tell, this is a pretty complex space strategy game (which is a rare sight on the App Store), and that makes a strategy nerd like me very excited. My only slight trepidation comes from how busy the UI looks on the PC screenshots; I hope they come up with a good tablet UI. The game should be releasing relatively soon, and if you want to join the beta (provided there are still spaces), go here. See you all in space.
