[h1] In A Nutshell [/h1]
🔵 [b] Pros [/b]
+ Simple but effective building mechanics.
+ Varied missions encouraging players to make new designs each time.
+ Minimalist, clean and polished graphics well-suited for this type of game.
+ Integrated Workshop support to share and download ship designs.
🔴 [b] Cons [/b]
- Several grammar and spelling mistakes are present in the English language.
- Limited building tools lacking essential features like Undo or Multiple Selection.
- Overlapping, annoying sound effects in case of many guns or engines used together.
- Pretty small selection of ship parts, weapons and systems.
Galactic Shipwright (GS) is a mission-based sandbox game all about designing ships suited for specific tasks, different in each proposed level. After a brief tutorial explaining how building works, you already have unlimited freedom in designing your space vessel: the game poses no limit of blocks or resources as what to create in each mission. This fact can deliver a lot of fun on one side, but also can result unbalanced on the other. Anyway, there are certain factors to consider when building a ship such as energy consumption, mass, structural integrity and most of all efficiency for that level's mission.
Engines, weapons and eventual shields consume energy when used, while moving around making turns and maneuvers exerts force on the ship's structure, which can even snap and break if not built properly. Damage to the ship can only be repaired with special "Repair Tokens" found while exploring each map, and repairing a substantial amount of your damaged blocks. A ship gets destroyed if the Core Block is destroyed, so it has to be well defended. Threats found in missions include enemy ships, homing mines, asteroids, and even gravity anomalies.
Unlike other space games, there is only 2D movement in GS, as your ship won't be able to ascend or descend, but only turn around and accelerate. This is an unusual choice but hardly new. Missions are quite varied and each presents unique challenges, and they're about combat, transportation, recovery or even a mix of these three things together. The bad side is that the campaign features only a handful missions, and besides the Arena mode, there isn't much else to do in the game.
Overall I found this title to be fun and entertaining: building new ships to overcome challenges is really exciting, the only real issue is there isn't enough of it! For this price, still, i'd say the game is worth it as it can deliver good fun even if for a quite limited time.
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[h1] In-depth Feature Analysis [/h1]
🎮 [b] Gameplay [/b]
Gameplay of Galactic Shipwright is divided into Design and Missions.
At the start of each mission, the ship you used in the previous one will be loaded as default. The building interface is simple enough to understand, featuring mouse-based block placement, various menus containing the different types of blocks to use, and some decent functions such as drag-to-add placement to not click each time: Some other base functions are instead missing such as multiple selection, undo or copy-paste, making designing complex ships quite a chore.
Available blocks feature, aside from normal plain ones, a handful of weapons, some fixed other turreted, ranging from lasers, plasma turrets to railguns, while utility ones include shield generators, thrusters, power plants and batteries. To be honest there isn't that much variety in any of the block categories, and the only really fresh block is the "servo" one, enabling players to build moving parts in their ships, but very hard to use. As said before there is no limit to what one can create in any mission, but often size and weapons do not matter, design does.
Missions are mainly of three types: delivery, passenger transport and combat, there can also be a mix between these types. Each mission will become harder as the campaign progresses, with the last mission being a real design challenge for expert shipwrights, as it should be. Overall they are satisfying and varied enough to keep up the interest.
📖 [b] Story [/b]
N/A
👊 [b] Combat System [/b]
Combat is a ship-to-ship ranged fight. What matters most is inflicting a lot of damage quickly, to destroy the enemy ship's core. A critical role is played not only by where the core is placed, but also eventual shields will make any ship a tough nut to crack. Each weapon will consume energy as engines and shields do, running out means being in trouble. Unfortunately through the campaign, enemy ships will be pretty mediocre and none will pose a good challenge to any remotely decent player-built ship, so don't expect epic capital ship battles, because there aren't. Combat is good on its own, I just wish there was more of it, and more enemies, in the campaign.
💰 [b] Content & Pricing [/b]
Priced at 8€ base tag, and offering around 4 hours of content for the main campaign, and an additional Arena mode to make player-built ships fight around, the game is a bit lacking content wise, even if what it delivers surely is fun and entertaining. This is why i suggest buying this full price only to fans of this genre, wile to all others i suggest waiting for a sale.
🔗 [b] Balance & Challenge [/b]
The fact a player can build a ship with unlimited blocks makes combat pretty unbalanced, even against multiple enemy ships. A limit to blocks usable in each mission would be a great challenge improvement. Design levels where firepower doesn't matter are much tougher and will require some thought and many attempts before getting it right.
[h1] Technical Analysis [/h1]
🎥 [b] Graphics [/b]
Minimalist for sure, but also clean and smooth, well suited for this type of game. I found them pleasant to the eye and appropriate.
🔊 [b] Sound [/b]
Multiple engines, guns or other sources can mash up together and create an horrible, headache inducing cacophony especially on larger ships. Apart from this issue the audio compartment is average and not particularly good or bad in anything.
🔩 [b] Performance & Stability [/b]
Mostly solid, but beware of huge and insane designs as they will slowdown your game considerably even on powerful systems. On average the game runs well and has no particular issues. [i7 4820K, GTX1080, 16GB RAM].
💻 [b] Artificial Intelligence [/b]
Enemy ship AI is decent and even if damaged or crippled will hunt you down relentlessly, and make do with what it has. Don't expect any advanced tactic from your foes, but they ain't completely brainless either.
🏠 [b] Quality of Life [/b]
Decent enough, it does the job, though more functions in the ship builder would be very welcome and make life a lot easier. The built-in Workshop uploader is a nice addition for players to share their designs.
🐛 [b] Bugs & Issues [/b]
If F12 is pressed at the end of a mission the interface will disappear, and the mouse aswell, a restart is needed to fix this. A mission can end even if the objective has not been completed properly. Overall there are not a lot of bugs but the few ones i found were on the quite bad side. Nothing game-breaking though.
[h1] Conclusion [/h1]
Galactic Shipwright is a pretty decent indie game that delivers good fun and involvement, too bad the content offered is a bit sub-par even at this low price, balance is not perfect, and variety is not the best. An average indie game in conclusion, with some good ideas and mechanics, but really held back by unused potential and content.
This product was reviewed using a free key provided by the Developers.
