[h1]Floats My Missile Boat[/h1]
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Flotilla is quite beloved on Steam. An utterly solid, understated turn-based strategy game with whimsical story encounters and accessible but challenging combat set to classical music. It was utterly unique. Utterly Blendo.
Flotilla 2 brings back that unique dance of ships with its one rule 'HIT THE REAR OR THE BOTTOM' to damage, in a very VR way and benefits massively from it.
For fans crying out for a non-VR Flotilla 2, I don't think you'd want this. It's very much a VR interpretation of Flotilla à la Doom VFR (and the other Bethesda VR experiences) through and through. It ditches the adventure mode with its randomised narrative encounters involving space cats, as well as upgrades, loot, fleet management, etc. This is the base combat experience via designed scenarios made VR and that's great. Whilst I'm sure there could have been a way to make a roguelike adventure mode more instantly compelling for VR, it feels fine to be rid of it. The conceit instead is that you're doing VR scenarios within the Flotilla universe. There's something so confident about spawning you in a room with 100 level cartridges, a console to boot them up in and a virtual headset to put on. That setup is something that worked well for Superhot VR and it does here too. It could have done well to follow Superhot VR's lead, though, and add some of that missing in action character into that blank white room. It's the same understated Flotilla, but I don't think a full-scale space cat would have gone amiss. Instead, a massive instruction on the wall to 'use one controller' looms large. When you can freely interchangeably use your hands (not between actions, mind), I don't know why this was so pressing.
The major gain from VR is in the controls and perspective. Where once you had to laboriously adjust vertical and lateral movement and orientation individually one by one, now you can select, drag and physically orient a ship all at once in a single movement. It's delightfully intuitive and feels like the perfect realisation of the original Flotilla's focus on 3D movement. Then, when you trigger the action, VR lets you freely shift and get the perfect look as close or as far as you want. Ships don't need to be commanded to fire or given a priority target, they'll do so passively when you get them into range. It may sound like motion control casualisation, but I think it's actually just being free of restrictive controls that didn't do the concept justice originally.
BIG TIPS HERE. Brendan Chung has created a wonderfully done PDF manual for the game that I found on Twitter. Why some of the information present isn't made immediately apparent in-game, I really don't know. If it's a push to bring back the physical manual conventions of long ago over tutorials in-game, it's going largely unnoticed I think. Vital things like being able to back out to level select by holding the trigger and simulating taking your virtual headset off (neat but not obvious), cancelling special orders or orders via holding the menu button, what the supply crates do when you collect them (charge your special abilities and show enemy ghosts for next turn) and the controls of the level create mode are all not made clear in-game. Additionally, for those of us who don't get VR sickness, a setting in-game to get rid of the occlusion cone when you shift around rather than having to add '-cameracone false' to the game's command-line parameters would have been preferable.
That level select room, oppressively empty as it might be, still works well. I love the physical ritual of taking a scenario cartridge from a shelf and inserting it into the console. It can be annoying when you want to be seated for actual play to then have to go out of your way to pick up a cartridge. Thankfully, by using the added 'reset position' on the grips, you can centre yourself such that you can easily reach cartridges, insert them, and put on the headset seated. It helps not to interrupt the flow so much. Perhaps my favourite detail is simply how the zero gravity will make all the levels you've completed and removed from the console float away like an explosion of success.
Scenarios open with a Bach little prelude numbers 1-3 with a hand-designed level of environmental complications in space junk, mines, space anomalies and death balls alongside your various classes of ships - which could be anything from a single ship to a flotilla (namesake!). You use your sonar, drag yourself around the space, assess what you have at your disposal and the threat, and make your move. An ability to rotate the space might have been welcome, but it's not often an issue. Scenarios usually play on iterative cadences of an environmental obstacle being between your two flotillas or combinations of ships that would be interesting - like making you play hide and seek around obstacles with the smallest Missile Boats against the largest anti-material particle cannon spewing Superheavy Platforms. It's called Flotilla, so small skirmishes is literally the name of the game. Whilst I would have loved some larger battles, the limited number of ships allows for less stop and start gameplay that would have got particularly tiresome in VR.
The unique spin Flotilla throws on its genre is the need for all its projectile missile-based ships to hit each other in the lightly-armoured orange and grey pattern marked bottom and rear areas to score any damage at all. All hits otherwise show off the wonderful individually rendered missiles bounce helplessly off armour in a semi-comedic manner. The only exceptions to this are the Beam Battleship with its low travel and short range, Superheavy Platforms which throw out lasers unimpeded by range, but can travel only very small distances and can't freely pivot like the rest without the use of a special ability, and perhaps the most interesting, the Heavy Tug - which can ram and tractor beam ships to use environmental hazards against them. The classes have a great balance overall, but I wish there was some more creativity seen so wonderfully in the Heavy Tug. Each class has special orders in the form of various arnaments and manoeuvres with move cooldowns that can be equipped by inserting your controller into floating cartridges. It's ultra-intuitive and has great variation in everything from teleporting, locked-on missiles, a ship-disabling kinetic bomb and the aforementioned Heavy Tug's stand-outs. It also helps to balance out the large ships' raw power by saddling them with simple manoeuvring orders, in pivots and fast pivots and empowering the small with powerful offensive options so they can hold their own. Disabling ships (for one turn) is a very valid strategy, either by using the environment or even kamikaze collisions. It can be crucial to taking out the more devastating classes before they ravage your forces.
This one rule makes for a glorious dance of ships to watch, whilst Raindrop Prelude Op. 28 No.15 by Chobin lends to evoke 2001: A Space Odyssey. It could have used perhaps a bit more variation music-wise, but their renditions that are there are certainly great. It's an ultra relaxing experience of all things and sets itself massively apart from its great swathes of high octane or otherwise awe-driven VR compatriots. You lie back, relax, and take in the refreshing noiseless presentation, the bell dings of shots on-target, and the Blendo whimsy of a chorus of cheering or 'awws' upon success or failure.
[b]Review continues in comments...[/b]
