Pixel Foundry’s entry into the tower defence genre is Blackspace, a real time strategy game set in locations in space.
Blackspace stands out from the bunch thanks to it’s wonderfully clean visuals and attractive design, but further distinguishes itself as you learn more about the game. Using your mining vehicle, you are able to defend your asteroid by creating valleys in the fully destructible environments using the game’s physics engine. The utility of the mining vehicle doesn’t stop there, as it is your primary tool in defending your location. It can extract resources, build and relocate defensive structures, and also act as a line of defence. Further, the game features an upgrade system that allows the player to customize the way in which they approach missions and events. For instance, you can opt to upgrade your defensive structures to make them more effective or decide to upgrade your mining vehicle itself so that it can become a fierce combatant in it’s own right. This adds to the personality of the game, and also increases replayability as you are able to explore different strategies to finish any particular mission. Blackspace is both beautiful and innovative, and I personally cannot wait to play this game.
Features:
Destructible everything. Pretty much anything can be destroyed and harvested. The entire ground can be demolished down to the super dense core. Old wreckage, derelict mining bases, even your own demolished structures break apart and can be reclaimed.
Discovery. The terrain is a blanket covering resources, and technology. It becomes truly exciting to see that blip on your depth sensor indicating something beneath the surface. Anticipation of the dig, wondering what type of resource and the value it will have, and finally uncovering and extracting it.
Geological strategy. A base can be built anywhere the ground is level enough, but dirt is weaker than rock. The type and amount of resistance you are likely to face may change your decision to build right next to that element deposit in favor of building on more stable surfaces, then relying on your ability to defend resource transportation to your base.
Physics. Use physics to crush your enemies, smash them into one another or into the ground…or…if you’re feeling primitive, drop a big rock on them. You can even test your trajectory skills and try to send them into orbit.
Customize. Your ship is customized to your play style. It has many different loadouts and upgrades that can be equipped, swapped, or expanded. These tools and attachments are the way you interact with the world. Far beyond a simple mouse click, you can sculpt the terrain, dig for elements, collect scrap, hoist wreckage, repair buildings and much more. The capabilities of your “Lander” are designed by you. If you like hanging back and letting your turrets do the talking, spend money on your regeneration systems or upgrade the scanner array. If your’e feeling a bit more vindictive, you can equip your mining tools with weapons-grade explosives and beef up your armor. Its up to you.
Command. It’s not just towers, while you’re not babysitting hordes of units constantly like in many RTS games, you do build and command units, albeit a bit more passively. Your units will be constructed and deployed for many different tasks. There will be units that gather resources, repair and that even defend your base locally. Units in Blackspace will be intelligent and perform their tasks without much need for player contribution other than an order here or there when their duties are to be changed, though you’ll need to setup defenses around their work sites if you expect any to survive.
Nowhere to hide. This “map” has no corners. Enemies could potentially come from any direction. But, with some early scouting, and intelligence gathering, you will be able to predict the general direction of the front line so you can dig in and deploy before the enemy strikes.
Structure alchemy? That’s right, you can combine structures into grids, the arrangement and combination of structures will offer special enhancements to the operations within that grid.
Occulus Rift VR. It’s an innovative new VR headset and a recently successful Kickstarter. We are VR nerds and really want to support this.
NVIDIA 3D Vision For those who have the hardware, you will be able to play Blackspace in full stereoscopic 3D with NVIDIA’s 3D Vision technology.