Early Access Pick: Devouring Stars is an RTS that forces adaptive strategy - [INDIEGAMING]

The real time strategy genre naturally lends itself to games centered around conflict. Typically, an RTS game involves gathering resources to use as currency or materials for unit building, researching upgrades, and building new and better (or different) units as you go along. Devouring Stars, which is already content-complete and only in Early Access for purposes of balancing and tweaking the game, offers a very different style of gameplay in which the units you start with are all you have, the only resource is one that protects them from harm, and the only way to upgrade units is to fuse your existing ones together.

The game is framed as a war between factions whose entities (units) are named for the gods of Greek mythology. It takes place in space, amongst galaxies and nebulae where these forces can pull stars from their places to use them as shields in battle. At the beginning of the campaign, the player's faction has been all but destoyed and must build its forces back up.

The galaxy map where battles are chosen is one of the most interesting I've seen. The player is presented with an abstract star field that can be rotated in all directions. When viewed from certain angles, battles will be visible. The battles seen from a given angle come as a set, kind of like a mini-campaign. Only one of the battles will be available at first and once it's beaten the player can move on to the next, and so on. The icons for the battles reveal certain information about it such as which faction(s) the player will be fighting, both graphically and in mouseover text, which helps the player decide if they want to tackle this set of levels. The player can leave that set of levels behind any time they want, but they lose their progress and any gains from it behind if they do.

For each set of levels, the player chooses a set number of units to start with, and those are the only units they have for those levels. If a unit is lost in the first level in the set, the player goes into the following set with one fewer unit. Aside from the obvious difficulty increase caused by having fewer units on the field, this can affect the strategies available to the player later because of the way unit ugrades work.

There are four basic units which can be combined to form 15 more, arranged in three combination trees with different themes. The advanced units have special abilities which can turn the tide of battle, but do so at the cost of reducing the total number of units at your disposal. The advanced units can be broken back down into their constituent parts, but combining units in the first place incurs a cost in time. A player can therefore choose units at the beginning of a set of levels with a specific kind of strategy in mind, but as their units fall in battle, they'll have to adapt to work with the reduced number of options available to them.

All of this takes place on procedurally generated star fields. Since absorbing stars is how units make themselves resistant to damage, it can have a great effect on positioning. Edging the enemy away from the nebulae can be the key to victory and losing access to the stars can be the seal of doom. The battles available are also procedurally generated, making for a game with the potential for a great deal of replay value.

Devouring Stars does support multiplayer, but only locally. The game says that the developers are considering adding online multiplayer, but no commitment to it has been made.

The developers' focus during early access is interface and balance changes. The game is only to be in early access for a couple of months and the game can be completed from beginning to end in its current form, so if you're interested in the game, it certainly wouldn't hurt to get it now. It's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux on Steam for $9.99 with the final release price yet to be announced.

[Devouring Stars]

from IndieGames.com http://ift.tt/1Dk0j8D
via IndieGaming, visit and read the original first posting to get complete and more detail about this article, support the independence Gaming , Enjoy