The authentic Captain Forever, a browser-based recreation about blowing up hostile spaceships and nicking their components to construct your individual, is slightly bit particular to me. Years again, it was my go to recreation in a college that had locked down entry to most school-distraction offering web sites – however I’d most likely have performed it for months on finish even when the remainder of the web was open to me. Trying to destroy ships whereas additionally minimising injury to them was a blast, and improvising new designs from the ensuing particles blended creativity with resourcefulness in a approach that was deeply satisfying.
All of that made the upcoming launch of Captain Forever Trilogy good news to get up to on a bleary Friday. It’s a revamped model of the unique recreation, its sequel (not Captain Forever: Remix) and its clone-creating spin off, with some fancy new wing modules and the minimalist story fleshed out and re-rewritten by Cassandra Khaw.
Cassandra Khaw’s written for Sunless Skies, Failbetter’s sequel to Sunless Sea. You may additionally have seen her phrases in creepy paper assemblages akin to Hammers on Bone or A Song For Quiet. I count on Captain Forever is about to get about 150% extra sinister.
In Captain Forever, you begin out with a handful of components and a few minutes to throw a primary ship design collectively. Then you fly off into the galaxy, encountering more and more deadlier ships as you’re employed your approach up by tiers of weapons, hulls and boosters. Everything you will get your palms on is necessary, although the one factor that really issues is your cockpit module – lose that, and you need to begin over. Look, you may still play it for free.
Solo dev ‘Farbs’ has shifted every little thing over to a brand new renderer, permitting for “glorious full screen, high framerate, GPU accelerated glory”. That’s numerous superb glory, however Farb deserves to be indulged. In that spirit, right here’s some data on the brand new wing modules from his blog:
“While working on something totally unrelated I saw how much wing shapes opened up spaceship design, and I thought damn, I wish I’d known that when I built Captain Forever. Then I remembered that I’m still building Captain Forever, in so much as I’m rebuilding it anyway. So I added space wings! Of course, space wings make no sense and decorative modules would starkly oppose the CF design, so… they’re shields. Which totally works. Think of them as ablative shielding for re-entry, serving double duty as laser fire absorbers. They’re lightweight and can take a lot of damage, but you can’t anchor other modules to them so they don’t replace girders. I think they’re pretty neat!”
Farbs additionally mentions that he’s redesigned a number of the different modules, and that “7 years on CF is finally starting to look like it did in my head back when I started building it.”
Those wings can be within the Captain Successor and Captain Imposter components of Captain Forever Trilogy, however not the revamped model of Captain Forever that’s in Captain Forever Trilogy. That model of Captain Forever has nonetheless been souped up, however serves as a vanilla counterpoint to the extra various modules floating round Captain Successor. Simple, proper?
For some cause Captain: Remix by no means grabbed me, and I solely came upon CS and CI existed immediately. I’ve little doubt nostalgia is closely contributing to my pleasure about taking part in an improved model of Captain Forever when Trilogy comes out on May 22nd, however I’m additionally sure that the sport can be enjoyable independently of that nostalgia enhance. I bear in mind getting as much as methods like manoeuvring in order that two enemy ships would tear one another aside, or wedging my tiny ship in a way more highly effective one and whittling it down whereas it helplessly spun round.
I’m trying ahead to getting caught in once more.
Disclosure: Cassandra Khaw used to put in writing our Bargain Bucket column.
