Nine Dots Studios have had a tough time trying to get their up-coming spacecraft, dog-fighting, team-based, shooter game (that’s definitely the technical term) GoD Factory: Wingmen off the ground, with them failing to reach their goals in two Kickstarter events. Thankfully, though, Nine Dots Studios have announced that the game has been greenlit through Steam Greenlight, and I for one am very pleased about this.
GoD Factory: Wingmen is still in pre-release stage, so there wasn’t a huge deal of game modes for me to play around with. There’s the ship-builder, which I spend far too long playing around in, the tutorial, and one online game mode.
To start off with I played with the tutorial, and instantly noticed just how beautiful this game is. Sure, the graphics aren’t up to scratch when compared to the latest high-definition triple-A titles, but the vivid colours and environments really make the game stand out. I was genuinely taken aback by just how good it looks. The tutorial gave me all the basic information that you’d expect from a tutorial: how to fly the ship and do incredible backflips and other tricks useful for dogfighting, fire weapons, and how to play the game mode found in the multiplayer. Needless to say, all quite simple, especially when the game mode to learn was a simple ‘destroy the enemy base before they destroy yours’ type thing.
Once I’d gotten a hang of how to pilot a ship, I went straight into the ship builder to start building my own. Originally I’d planned to build two of my own, as an interesting feature of GoD Factory: Wingmen is that you take two ships into a match with you, and you’re then free to swap them mid-game in the hangar of your HQ.
Incredibly for a pre-release game, there was an enormous amount of customisation. There are four main classes of ship to build, and each get their own specialist abilities – Ar Blossom, Chorion, Guantri and Human. You choose what body of the ship you want, wings, weapons, shields, etcetera. They all have their own statistics, and you’re given a limit on how much weight you can have, and how much heat can be emitted, which means people can’t just create a ship out of the best parts. Each part also has 4 stages of upgrade, with more upgraded parts being more ‘expensive’.
The Human ships look like a cross between a tank and a jet-fighter, and have the unique ability of being able to send out a decoy to confuse other players. Guantri ships are held together by an electrical force, and can switch between offensive and defensive modes, granting bonuses depending on what mode they’re in. They also appeared to be the only ship with access to an electrical taser beam. Chorion are interesting as they look less like a ship and more like a giant creature floating through space. They’re able to take the most damage, and have an ability which lets them absorb 50% of damage. Finally Ar Blossom takes the guise of a generic, cool-looking alien ship, with wings and bits sprouting out here, there and everywhere. These get the nifty ability to teleport out of harm’s way, and in doing so creating an explosion which damages the enemy.
Unfortunately, due to the game still being pre-release, it took a while for me to get into an actual game, but eventually I found a lobby, and was launched into an incredibly fast paced and frantic dogfight with the enemy. Games last around 15 minutes on average, and can’t last more than 25, because every 5 minutes each HQ takes damage from the other. Matches are fast and action packed, it was like playing Unreal but in a spaceship.
GoD Factory: Wingmen has a lot of potential, and I’m happy that it’s been greenlit for Steam. According to Nine Dots Studios the game will cost somewhere in the region of $20 when it’s finally released, and should be available for PC, Mac and Linux users.
The game is dead now.
0 players online as of today.