semiBad

Flotilla

I'm not going to do the usual 'I am such a bad blogger I write nothing for months' line — let's face it, you know all that. Instead, I'm going to talk about Flotilla, a weird and wonderful little indie game by Blendo Games for PC and Xbox (under the increasingly time-worthy 'indie games' flag).

Each playthrough of Flotilla begins in the same way: you have been given seven months to live, and decide to play out your remaining days with one final jaunt through the galaxy. Choosing a planet from a randomly generated 'galactic map' moves your Flotilla to that system, and a short bit of (sometimes hilarious) text detailing what happens to you there. Some encounters give you a choice — do you choose to help a couple of white-collar criminals escape a pirate attack, or sucker-punch them and nick their equipment? Some play out differently depending on previous encounters, or continue from them — a vengeful casino that you 'forgot' to pay might send bounty hunters after you. Some just drop you straight into ship-to-ship combat, and the game proper.

Flotilla's combat system is lovely — a turn-based strategy played out in thirty-second nuggets, and one of the few games I've ever played to make genuine use of all three dimensions. Each ship can be ordered to move and rotate in any direction, and instructed to fire at a single enemy craft (or to pick its' own targets). Basic movement allows the ships to blast away as they travel — or you can choose to travel at flank speed (moving a great distance to get behind an opponent, while sacrificing weapons) or to focus fire (which trades travel distance for a massive rate of fire).

The strategy, then, is getting your ships into flanking positions around your opponents, and letting rip. This is where the 3D element comes in — in his video demonstration of the game's combat, Flotilla's designer Brendan Chung points out that "Ships have weaker armor on the bottom and the rear". While this is definitely true, it understates the case a little — all ships are completely invulnerable from the front or top, and can rotate at will on 3 axes. So the name of the game is accurately predicting where they'll move during the next turn, and using multiple ships to force errors without leaving your own ships unprotected.

Once you've drawn your lines in space, the turn ends — and the game is completely out of your hands for the next thirty seconds (or until one side dies, whichever is sooner). The moves you and your opponent chose play out in realtime, against the gentle tones of various Chopin sonatas. The effect is at once bizarre and beautiful — serene and relaxing, even as hundreds of missiles arc through space.

The graphics are simple, blocky, and clear — like colourful Elite ships built out of Lego. The ships are charming and easy to differentiate between, from the Star-Destroyeresque Battleships to the tiny Proto Fighter (which is, bizarrely, a small hatchback car). The controls are grand (I tested this on XBox) although they take some getting used to — learning to rotate your ships manually is the most important part of the game, but is never explained properly. And the actual combat sections are a real selling point — sometimes reminiscent of a virtual fishtank as craft glide silently around each other. In many ways, the turn based aspect is not dissimilar to football management games, or even the VATS system in Fallout 3 — setting up a plan, then watching it execute in front of you.

Flotilla is $10 on PC, or 400 points on XBox live. I genuinely recommend you at least pick up one of the demos — my only problem with the game is that there's not a bit more of it.