Developer: Kerberos Productions
Publisher: Kerberos
Platform: PC, Android
Sword of the Stars: Ground Pounders – Update
A lot has changed since we did our preview on Sword of the Stars: Ground Pounders. The game has entered Early Access on Steam and has gotten several updates. Perfect time to discover how much the game has evolved by now.
First of all, the player is now able to build a deck himself, which wasn’t an option in the earlier build. There are a lot of cards to choose from so making a deck to your liking should be no problem. As there’ll be a lot of different decks between players, it’ll keep the matches exciting as you don’t know what you can expect.
A campaign mode is also available now and tutorials have been polished up. Bit by bit, the full version of Ground Pounders starts to surface. There are now 8 maps ready to be tested out which is a huge increase compared to the alpha demo. Subterranean units have been added together with cards specifically made for them.
Overall, there have been a whole lot of fixes and improvements compared to the Ground Pounders I tested before it got into Early Access. More information concerning the cards, better tutorials (although there are still a couple left unfinished at this point), tweaked game mechanics in general and so on. While playing this beta, it almost felt like a whole new game. Not in the sense that Ground Pounders is something totally different in terms of what the game is all about, but more in the way HOW it plays. It’s just much more enjoyable and smoother and it looks like it has come a long way since the preview I wrote. Keep in mind though that it won’t appeal to anyone. You’ll have to be patient and determined to learn everything the game has to offer; otherwise it might seem not very enjoyable.
However, as almost every Early Access title, this one too isn’t without it flaws. Audio, for example, is still very monotonous and dull and sometimes it sounds like two songs are being mixed up with each other, causing the music feel very out of order. Restarting a game tended to help as it wasn’t possible to turn the sound off (even though there’s an option provided in the settings tab).
Unfortunately, as I already discussed in the preview, there’s still no option to change the screen resolution. Often, I like having my screen windowed, but without changing the resolution, it’s just a tiny screen which makes playing not very comfortable.
Another hiccup while trying to load my previously saved is that the informed me that my save file wasn’t compatible with this version of the game so it decided to perform a not so lovely disappearing trick. This is a more crucial problem that’s needs to get looked at as it can possible ruin someone’s pleasure of playing the game.
In the end, Ground Pounders seems to be getting there, piece by piece, slowly but steadily. This beta proved to be a vast improvement towards the earlier version I played and it all felt much more like a real game. There’s still work to be done, that’s for sure, but Kerberos Productions seems to be on the right track.
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