Developer: Decaying Logic
Publisher: KISS ltd
Platforms: PC
Tested On: PC
All Guns On Deck – Preview
The seas have always formed an interesting battlefield through history, also for games. All Guns On Deck builds further upon naval warfare with strategy, action, a ton of enemies and juicy guns that make a lot of explosions. Play as a naive young sea captain and take your crew onto the high seas and crush your enemies.
Yarr! Let’s go to battle on the seas! Well, All Guns On Deck isn’t a pirate game, but you do fight off enemies with your enormous warship. All Guns On Deck is a naval RTS where you assemble your own state of the art warship and go to the high seas in order to fight off all Marooned Forces that have taken over the area. You don’t have to do this all by yourself though, you’re playing as a captain: a young, naive captain.
Currently, the game spans across one area. Your mission as a young captain is to head into this enemy infested water and take out all of them, no prisoners! You won’t be fighting other ships though, as the game features water to air combat. You’ll be fighting off jets and other aircraft, and a lot of them.
For you to be able to take down enemies, you have to navigate through the map that uses a grid system. Some dots are red, and this indicates that enemy forces are to be found there. Inside the dot you’ll see a number, this is how many waves of enemies you have to defeat in order to get rid of the enemies in that dot. This is all randomly generated so you could have dots with two waves, but sometimes as much as nine. Every time you defeat all enemies inside an area, you’ll get bounty which you can use back on the land to buy new “chips”, which are basically upgrades for your ship. All the ships have a limited amount of chips you can use, which is a nice feature instead of the age-old inventory system.
At the moment, the enemy system is a bit too randomized. Sometimes you’ll have a cakewalk with five enemies per wave but it can go up to thirty and higher, making it very difficult to defeat all of them in one go. However, the longer you’ll survive, the more bounty you’ll collect. The bad thing is that if you die, you’ll lose all of your bounty but the waves you’ve defeated will be subtracted from the total waves, making it easier and easier every time you die.
In the beginning, you’ll be fighting with a simple ship that has one weapon and a few crew members. In order to keep your ship operational, you have to have some crew work ammunition, some weapons and some are also constantly repairing the ship. You may also need some firemen here and there and a welder, to make sure your ship doesn’t run full of water. There’s also some other crew members, including ones that are in a hazmat suit but these aren’t needed yet, maybe there’s some fun nuclear or alien combat coming along the development phase?
Having a simple ship gets very annoying over time though. You’ll die a lot so you won’t get a lot of bounty from the waves, resulting in fewer upgrades. This continues to be an issue even with better ships as well. Most ships get taken down fairly easily and it takes a while to get back to where you were, as the map navigation is fairly slow. It would be nice to be able to get a little piece of the bounty you’ve collected so far every time you get taken down. Getting random upgrades by taking down enemy territories would also prove interesting. However, once you get to the last ship and fully upgrade it with five weapons, the game pretty much turns into a steamroller, so it seems that a lot of balancing still has to be done.
Another thing that needs work is the AI. You can manually shoot the guns of your ship or let your crew members do it. However, your crew members are bloody awful and miss almost everything. They seem to be aiming directly at the ships, while a flak canon grenade might take a bit to reach the target. It’s like they don’t understand how to lead their shots, so hopefully they’ll become less retarded. Maybe a ranking up system can be implemented where your crew gets better and more efficient over time?
The game also features a small tutorial, but it’s far too fast paced and you don’t fully know what you’re doing until you get into the game. It only shows combat at sea, but not how to navigate the map. Sadly, it took me about 10 minutes to figure out you have to press the dots on the map in order to travel to them. The “Chip” feature should also be explained, as it can be quite confusing the first time you look at it.
Conclusion
Currently, All Guns On Deck is a very nice and polished game where you can sink quite a bit of time into. Killing enemies is very satisfying and fun to do and it has quite a bit of play time for being so early in development. However, the game does still need a lot of work. It needs way more chip types, more ships, more diversity, improved AI and the list goes on. With a lot of love and creative ideas, this could be the next Faster Than Light.
All Guns On Deck - Preview,
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