Player Preview - Defect

Title: Defect
Developer: Three Phase Interactive
Status: Demo

Official Site: http://bit.ly/1OfbNS9
Steam Page: http://bit.ly/1DogGTf
Kick-Starter: http://kck.st/1GtwfsK

Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a look at the space combat action game, Defect, the first PC and Mac title developed by the 3 man team over at Three Phase Interactive. You and your team are working to get new and improved spaceships out into the galaxy were you will act as designer, builder and captain to a crew of recently released prisoners.

The recurring mechanic in Defect has your crew of prisoners defecting and mutinying you of your own ship after the completion of every mission. That’s not the worst part either, that same ship and crew will be making a return to mess with you and your brand new ship. This has you designing ships at the start of every mission with the reminder that this ship will inevitably be stolen and used against you so designing a weakness that you can take advantage of isn’t the worst idea and is even were the game gets its name, Defect. You aren’t meant to build the best ship possible, you’re meant to build a ship that will succeed in its mission at the bare minimum requirement.

Mutiny!!!

The missions that you will be sent on will include general combat missions, races, mini-boss and boss fights. For each mission you will be given a short debriefing that will give you some idea as to how you want to build your ship to tackle the situation weather you build your ship for agility and speed, defence and weaponry or something in-between. Your first ship build will most likely fail especially in the later missions so you will have to go back to the drawing board and tinker with a couple of  the components to get it just right.

Building your ship is pretty intuitive with the ship building system that defect has implemented. As long as every piece of your ship is connected to the core, even if it’s via a chain of other pieces it will work and then you can manipulate every piece through scale and rotation to create something that is somewhat unique. There are some limited resources that you have to adhere to when building your ship however including power and crew members. Each part of the ship will have a certain power and crew member usage associated with it so you have to build within those restraints. As you complete each mission you will unlock more and more pieces to help you build better ships but again just be careful not to make something too powerful or you may come to regret it.

Building Ships Made Easy

The controls in the game are fairly simple with W activating your thrusters while “a” and “d” rotate your ship. If you’re struggling to manoeuvre your ship there are components to help increase its manoeuvrability including wings and rudders. For combat most weapons are forward facing unless otherwise rotated during the building phase so you will have to line up the front of your ship with the enemy most of the time. The weapons will automatically fire once you’re within range but you can take direct control of weapons via the direct control mechanic that not only works for all weapons but also engines, shields and wings to give those components a boost in effectiveness. Taking direct control of a weapon allows you to aim and fire where ever and whenever you want at least for the weapons that are able to rotate. The bonus given when taking direct control of one of your ships components is nothing to laugh at either and will undoubtedly be needed to be taken full advantage off for the later missions. 

We're Gonna Need a Bigger Ship

During combat as you would expect your ship will take damage with each component on the ship having its own health bar. While you can survive without your shields or armour it’s the more important components like your engines and crew quarters that will severely decrease your ability to fight if destroyed. There is a repair mechanic to the game though to help you get back to some sort of combat effectiveness by using scrap collected from ships you have destroyed to do some quick patch work. The combat as a whole though is a little simplistic with enemy ships just flying directly at you to get off their forward facing weapons and you’re doing basically the same thing. Without the third dimension it is hard to make the combat more interesting but luckily Defect doesn’t focus only on combat based missions, providing races, boss fights, base assaults and more.

Incoming Fire

Other features of the game include unique music to play too corresponding to what type of crew quarters you use for instance the circular crew quarters provides an eary alien kind of tune. A feature planned for release is the ability to take on other players creations in the challenge mode unfortunately this will only be an AI controlled ship but nonetheless it will be interesting to see other player’s creations in combat.

Altogether Defect is a fun combination of ship customization and space combat with the somewhat unique feature of your ship being stolen at the end of each mission leading to instant regret when it warps in with its new crew. The various mission type’s keeps the game interesting as the combat alone is basically a jousting match with the two ships flying into each other unloading all the weapons they have available. The ship building works great and is super easy to use, the system also provides progression to bigger, better ships so that you start of small with limited resources but by the end of the game you will be able to create massive ships with numerous weapons, shields, special equipment and more. Defect is definitely more of a creative focused space sim requiring you to build a new ship for every mission so if you’re the creative type and like space combat, then you should definitely check out Defect. If you’re looking for a more combat focused experience however, Defect may not be that game for you. There is a demo available to download so if you’re not sure you can try it out.

Space Station

Anyway, that’s been my player preview for Defect, the game has been green lit on Steam and is currently seeking funding via Kick-starter which it is currently at around 30 thousand of its 40 thousand goal. If you want to find out more about the game check out the links below. Thanks for watching, I’ll see you guys next time.