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### Battleships Forever Preview [PC]

#### http://www.wyrdysm.com/

#### Previewed By J. Monkman

When finalising the content for this issue I faced a dilemma in choosing the Featured Game. I really wanted to highlight one of the two work-in-progress releases that have been eating away all my free time since the Summer; namely Transcendence and this; Battleships Forever. Transcendence finally came out on top, but that doesn't make this any less of a game - in fact, with it's positively terrifying rate of development (the build included here is likely to be well out of date by the time you read this), some would argue that Battleships Forever is far more likely to reach completion out of the two (especially when you take into consideration that it has recently earned it's place as a Independent Games Festival 2008 Design Innovation Award finalist).

Heavily inspired and influenced by Hikoza T Ohkubo's freeware classic 'Warning Forever' (see this issue's Homebrew Retrospective article for more info), Battleships Forever is a Real-Time Strategy game created in the GameMaker language that features modular-based space craft, highly innovative combat mechanics and a plethora of game modes (ranging from the superbly designed campaign to free-play skirmish and a sandbox mode in which you can design and play out your own missions). In addition to this, the game includes a comprehensive ship editor (enabling you to create your own spacecraft using a similar interface to issue #03's Fraxy) and the whole package is wrapped up with such polish that it puts many commercial releases to shame - and unbelievably the game is not even out of the Beta stage of development!

The currently short campaign mode consists of a series of story-linked missions that act as a tutorial to the games complexities - and believe me, although initially simple thanks to the intuitive mouse control, Battleships Forever is a complicated game that features independent turret target selection and ship facing, formation controls and scores of defensive modules to get your head around (including a custom flux-projector force-field that you physically 'draw' with the mouse). Starting with basic manoeuvring and combat, the campaign slowly increases in difficulty and permits you access to the full range of seventeen playable battleships, destroyers and patrol craft - and by the time you've finished you'll instinctively know most of the initially bewildering keyboard commands by heart.

When you've completed the campaign there's a good deal of fun to be had in the skirmish mode (with it's four distinctly different game types), but the cherry on the top of it all is the easy to use sandbox mode; choose your arena size, lay out the terrain and add a selection of enemy, alliance and player ships to the mix - the bonus here is that you can even test out your own creations designed in the included ship editor. Out of all the different game modes available, this is the one that will eat away those hours more than any other. Watching a full armada of Battleships and Patrol craft rip each other apart, section by section is almost hypnotic.

As a preview, the current build (0.84c) is simply mind-blowing. No other game written in the GameMaker language comes even close to the quality of Battleships Forever - the depth and detail of the game is staggering, and I'll be surprised if Sean 'th15' Chan doesn't walk away from next years IGF with an award. Keep an eye on this one.