Developer: Blue Wizard Digital
Publisher: Blue Wizard Digital
Platforms: PC, Steam
Tested on: PC
Space Tyrant – Preview
Space Tyrant is a turn-based Early Access strategy game that’s being developed and published by Blue Wizard Digital with an old-school feel to it. With your mighty ships you blast away all fleets of those who oppose you so you can terrorize the galaxy and march with your commanders to total and utter space domination! So if you like subjecting every lifeform you can get your hands on, this is the game for you.
What is currently there of story elements in Space Tyrant is not much and you can see that this is not the focus of the developers, yet fun and exciting gameplay is. Story is necessary to set the tone for the game though, and it is a bit lacking, players get a general idea of what the game is about but there’s not much else to it. The developers would do great work by investing a bit more into the story segments, a little background about you, the space tyrant, would be welcome because saying “you have to conquer the galaxy because well… uhm… you’re a space tyrant” doesn’t help much. Integrating more story into the game could be done by getting collectibles into the game like pieces of a journal or something similar.
Space tyrant handles very colorful graphics and has 3D models that have an arcade-feel, although sometimes the models could look more polished, it doesn’t take away from the general feel and look of the game which is all in all excellent for an early access game. In battle scenes, there are a lot of particle effects going on with lasers and missiles from your and the enemy’s spaceships. These are all well executed and oh my god, nothing is more satisfactory than watching a big enemy ship explode, this witnesses excellent animation on that part.
The only critique here is that when overviewing the battlefield, the 3D-models of your spaceships, that orbit the planet which you sent them to, are a bit rough, but Blue Wizard Digital will hopefully get these polished soon in an upcoming update, not that it disrupts your game-experience in any way but smoothed out models would be more pleasing to the eye.
The same arcade feeling that the visuals have is reflected in the soundtrack of this game, accompanied by your average space woo-sounds. Also, integrated into the score is a strong military tone because you are here to conquer galaxies, after all. Space Tyrant manages this by having a steady beat of somewhat heavier synth tones that resemble war drums, space war drums.
The soundtrack may feel like an arcade game but the music in this game is by no means 8- or 16-bit. The utilization of synths is what gives off the arcadey feeling and gives it a bit of an old-school sound that fits in perfectly with the rest of the game. In general, concerning sounds and music, there is not much more work to be done, these are as good as finished.
Space Tyrant is what you could expect from a turn-based strategy game set in space. It has good mechanics and is overall not lacking in any way, you’d say it’s completed already. The game works like this: first you select a campaign, basically what empire you want to play with, and start it, after that you get to make a choice of which mission in which of the three galaxies you want to start. Each sector has 4 missions that you are able to complete. When you complete a mission, the galactic senate expands their control to a sector. Then when a sector has 4 senate counters, you lose because your reign of tyranny comes to an end when the senate can fully control a sector. These Senate counters aren’t permanent and can be removed by completing a mission in that sector, but not all missions have the same goals, they vary although missions can get quite monotone regarding their mechanics.
When you complete a mission, you get a reward, this is usually a crown, scepter or cloak that has an effect. Some missions though, allow you to permanently unlock a commander or a type of ship. These rewards persist even when you lose the campaign. This is good because you might have to restart your campaign a few times due to the senate killing all your commanders. No one said conquering galaxies was easy, eh?
Once a mission has started you will get an overview of the battlefield which are all planets and asteroids and space-stuff. You can then move your fleet once per turn to a neighboring planet to battle the fleet that might be protecting it to then invade the planet by means of a die-throw. Additional dice can be unlocked through effects of crowns, cloaks or scepters and by taking control of a barracks planet. When you successfully invade a planet, you explore it with the chance to find something and make a choice through a text-event. These text events are also mostly the same and are very repetitive. This might get on your nerves, but a few more planet exploration possibilities wouldn’t hurt.
Helping you in conquering these planets are your tyranny cards. These can be played by means of expending crystals. These crystals regenerate each turn and can be acquired by taking control of a crystal planet. Tyranny cards can have all different kinds of effects, allowing your fleet to move again or adding two frigates to a fleet for example.
During a mission, you can control up to three fleets that are controlled by your commander and two other “captains” that you can unlock by capturing a prison planet or by hiring one from your home world. These “captains” all have different battle powers too. Battle is conducted when two fleets from different factions orbit the same planet. Ships fire automatically but can also be activated to use their power, different ships have different powers of course. Blue Wizard Digital could’ve done a bit more with the battle scenes, as they can get repetitive and a bit boring because all you can really do is click on your different ships, a nice addition to this would be to be able to reposition your ships during battle to give it a bit more of a strategic tone.
Ships’ powers and the ships themselves can be upgraded through research, this is conducted automatically but goes faster if you control more planets that give you research points, for example: if you have 8/20 research points and your next turn will generate 12 research points then your scientists will have a technologic breakthrough and you will be able to upgrade a type of ship.
Of course, the senate is there to foil your evil plans. Each mission possesses a senate planet that has other planets ally with them every turn. The senate’s goal is the same as yours during the mission. Planets allied with the senate can start projects such as “deploy militia”, when completed, they will gain an extra fleet that can take additional planets, so it’s best to stop those as fast as you can.
Another vital part during your mission is your tyranny meter, when this reaches zero, you fail the mission. Tyranny can be gained through invading planets, destroying fleets and through tyranny cards, your tyranny decreases every turn because of the unrest in your empire. You start off with 10 unrest but this can become more or less throughout the course of the mission.
Conclusion
Overall there is not much to remark about this game, except for the sometimes-monotonous gameplay because it seems you’re just doing the same stuff all over again but with different accents. Besides that, it’s a ton of fun to mess with opponents and blasting their fleets like there’s no tomorrow. If Blue Wizard Digital could manage somewhat more diverse mechanics and integrate more story into Space Tyrant, then this could be an extremely good game. Aah, you smell that? Disintegrated techno slugs, I love the smell of disintegration in the morning.
Space Tyrant – Preview,
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