Flotilla: Review

Blendo Games, an outfit helmed by Brendon Chung, has been making a name for itself in recent years. Chung is one of a number of independent developers producing quality games with an unusual – some might say eccentric – bent, and selling them for extremely reasonable prices. I first became aware of Blendo’s work in early 2009 via Gravity Bone, a short free game about being a spy and, well, getting boned by gravity. You may have also heard about Atom Zombie Smasher, the latest Blendo offering, which I look forward to playing as soon as my self-imposed ban on buying games is lifted. (Steam sales, my friends, Steam sales. I need to play some of the many games I’ve already bought…)

Compared to Gravity Bone, Flotilla is an altogether more serious affair in terms of design, although both are permeated by a shared sense of humour. But before I get ahead of myself, let’s talk quickly about what kind of game this is. Its subtitle is “orbital battleship manouevres” which gives you some idea; Flotilla is all about starship combat. Unlike many games of this type positioning is key – the tactical decisions you make will determine whether you sail to glorious victory or explode to ignoble defeat. More on this later.

There are two modes: adventure and skirmish. The latter focuses on a component of the former, allowing you to select a flotilla from the seven different ship types and pit them against an enemy fleet. It’s a good way to toy around with different setups and experiment with tactics. The adventure game doesn’t offer up much info on what different ships can do so being able to battle with no consequences beyond immediate victory or defeat is helpful.

Adventure mode is the meat and potatoes, though, and is what drew me to the game in the first place. I’m a big fan of classic space exploration/combat/random skiffy weirdness ala. Star Control 2, Hyperspeed and EV Nova as well as pick-up and put-down titles like Strange Adventures in Infinite Space and sequel Weird Worlds. Since Flotilla is designed to serve up a 30 to 40 minute experience before your adventure ends and you begin again, the latter two titles are the closest in spirit. There’s an important distinction to be made here, however: whereas Digital Eel’s offerings are adventure games with a combat component, Flotilla is a combat game with an adventure component. It’s a matter of focus; Flotilla provides an adventure mode to justify stringing together a series of random battles and offer you some short-term sense of progress through acquiring a new ship or bit of equipment. It’s not much more than a framing device that adds a bit of mild colour and humour to the proceedings.

I figure this is a useful point to make as I was initially disappointed with Flotilla, which was a direct result of playing the game I wanted it to be rather than the game it was. Once I recognised what I was doing I was able to have a lot more fun with what Flotilla offers, because despite the limitations of the adventure mode the core combat component  is a lot of fun.

Earlier I mentioned that positioning is key. All ships have areas where their armour is almost-impenetrable (to the common weapons, at least). With the humble destroyer – your starter ship – that’s the front, top and sides, with the underbelly and rear being vulnerable. The trick is to keep your armoured areas pointed toward enemy projectiles whilst trying to manoeuvre into a position whereby you can strike at their weak points. The game works in 30-second real-time blocks; it’s turn-based, but once orders are issued and turns begun you can’t revise your decisions and must watch them play out.

There are exceptions and complications, of course: ships equipped with beam weapons can slice through any armour, but these ships tend to be slower than nippy little destroyers and must close to a short range in order to fire. They’re much more effective against larger vessels like battleships and dreadnoughts – provided they don’t get crushed by the sheer firepower of these juggernaughts.

The tactical possibilities of combat are diverse, but the small scale of Adventure mode engagements and the limited number of ships means you will often find yourself in very similar situations. This is initially good fun, and helps you to learn from your mistakes, but ultimately the lack of variety will become glaring. The game is more entertaining when you have different ship types to tinker with but you can only acquire these through exploration or combat. You always start with two destroyers and often you will play an entire game and not find an additional vessel. Upgrades are more plentiful but they are fairly unexciting – extra bottom or rear armour (since the game is about not exposing such areas I’m unsure how much these upgrades help) and faster move speed or fire rate.

The same lack of variety extends to the adventure mode outside combat, alas. The pool of events from which the game draws is quite shallow. In most games you will, for example, run into a naval toll station that demands cargo. It’s worth paying unless you can take on two battleships (pro tip: line them up so one of them accidentally shoots the other). You’ll also likely encounter the Bruja, run the non-risk of Space Madness, and one of your ship’s officers will accidentally kill a diplomat. There are some events which only occur as a result of previously encountered events which add a bit more variety but I’ve not seen these chains go very far, usually because the game arbitrarily ends before too much exploration. You start each adventure with seven months to live, you see, which means you can explore about 14 star systems. This limit also means you can’t save your game – which to be honest is a bit annoying with something that takes 40 minutes rather than, say, 10.

Still, limited variation aside the combat remains an enticing proposition. There are few games quite like this: where combat is about anticipation as much as anything else. The small fleet engagements are dances, seeing your fleet manoeuvring around its partners according to their own equally anticipatory movements – although the slow dance analogy falls apart when you shoot a cluster of rockets up your counterpart’s backside. Or does it? Fnarr, fnarr.

The game’s a well-rounded package to boot. The music, wonderfully serene and soothing, might seem at odds with the vicious space combat and the whimsical sci-fi universe you explore, but in practice it emphasises the delicate ballet of battle and helps produce a more considered, deliberate experience than – say – crunching metal riffs would manage. The graphics are great: simple and highly-stylised but designed so that you can tell at a glance what kind of ships you’re up against, which way they’re facing and who they intend to fire on. These clear visual cues are essential to the way the game works and without them combat would be frustratingly obtuse. There are also delightful visual touches like the streaks that volleys of rockets leave as they shoot through space, or the way beam lasers light up and begin firing before they’re in range – effectively as a warning that within seconds they’ll be carving Thanksgiving starship.

Ultimately I think Flotilla is a good little game and you’ll enjoy around a dozen entertaining adventures before the lack of variation drives you elsewhere. If you play beyond that point you’ll need to be heavily invested in the combat engine to prevent yourself from becoming bored – as endlessly replayable as Digital Eel’s output this ain’t – and you may derive more joy from playing around in the skirmish sandbox.

With that said it’s a low-cost game so whatever you pay you’ll get your money’s worth in just 4 or 5 hours! It’s £8.04 direct from Blendo, £6.99 on Steam, or 400 shekels on Xbox Live Indie Games. For once, that means Xbox Live is the best price – although Blendo get the whole chunk of money if you buy direct.