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Anyway, I finally got the game from a british store, it arrived just before I left on a vacation so I got to spend some time with it but without online play.
The singleplayer campaign isn't much to write home about, it does have five different campaigns of three levels each that are played in order and have varying themes. It's possible to end up with a ship so huge that everything dies as it enters the screen and the bullets give you huge numbers of extra lives (the number of points between lives is constant for some reason). I think that was very hard to do in Tumiki Fighters.
The editors are useful but limited.
Shape editor: There's no rotate function for entire selections (pieces are rotated individually), all blocks must have their "prism axis" aligned to one cardinal axis (can only rotate around that), mirroring can only be done along the horizontal axises, a piece's prism axis cannot be changed once it's placed, rotors are single blocks and have limited flexibility (would have been better to just declare a set of blocks as a rotor instead), shapes cannot be exported, scaling down is not possible if any selected block would fall below the minimum size as a result, rotated blocks just go haywire if you try to scale them with the d-pad, blocks that occupy the same position on your view cannot be selected easily (in Blender you just click multiple times to cycle through all objects in one space), there are no blocks with slopes in more than one direction (no spheres, pyramids or cones), trying to click on a scaling point on a block can change the selection instead.
Bullet Editor: Pretty good but lacks the ability to have complex projectiles (shapes) for some purposes, all bullets must look like one of the block shapes but cannot be reshaped (no elongated bullets, only squares...), can't rotate with the movement direction (that was possible in Tumiki Fighters!), no way to set an absolute direction for a bullet, no way to fork a separate bullet pattern, many stage patterns make too many assumptions like the roundshot automatically aiming at a target instead of travelling straight or the Wall pattern assigning random velocities (both of these could have been done with a separate stage but cannot be undone) and the restriction to only one adjustable value per stage (and some don't even use that) is highly restrictive (no burst fire rate, for example). New stages don't inherit the look and speed of previous stages, instead defaulting to small yellow squares at 50% speed no matter what. At the default volumes it's almost impossible to hear the sound effects you assign to the bullets over the background music.
(Player) Ship Editor: It has an integrated shape editor but the shape of a ship cannot be exported back into the shape library (only shapes in that library can be imported into others). The speed of the ship is hardcoded.
(Advanced) Enemy Editor: Shapes can't be exported, the stored position is the center of the shape so removing parts won't make the remaining parts stay in the same place, the rotation center is always the center of the bounding box which causes issues with large rotors (they count as occupying only one half of their visible shape and it's not arranged around the center) and, the worst, movements have a fixed list of patterns that one can be chosen from. Especially the movements are aggravating, there's only a very short, very restrictive list of movements allowed, this should have been implemented like the bullet editor! There are even some movements used in the premade levels that aren't available to the user! Hell, I wrote a more customizable enemy system in BASIC when I was in school! For some reason it's possible to create 32 groups (according to the manual) but only 25 parts to put into them...
Level Editor: I haven't done that much with it but in the absense of some triggers moving the editor camera affects the preview mode. Also it's not possible to use a custom ship in the preview mode even though a level can be made to assume a completely different player ship. The same applies to the enemy editor preview BTW, you can only test it with a default ship even if you want to make a ship with much less or much more firepower. Also it's not possible to make stuff come from any side other than the one the view scrolls toward since enemies are spawned as their positions come into view.
As I said I haven't tested the online stuff yet. The shapes I made were some attempts at recreating units from RTS mods I made (the abstract shapes mod was strangely difficult to emulate while the more normal spaceship mod was really easy) and a top-down tank level (which looked fairly convincing despite the game being intended for spaceships or planes). What really sucks is that things that are set to "shatter" don't shatter, they just fall normally but blink, marking them as non-collectable. That looks just damn ugly and forces you to split your enemies into lots of small parts to get a proper explosion. Tumiki Fighters had stuff break down into its individual blocks, while TF's shapes were much simpler it'd still be better if BW's shapes would break into at least a few fragments (or just show an explosion).
The game comes with three premade levels demonstrating different styles, one using paper planes, origami and various desk utensils as enemies along with a pen&paper look, one demonstrating levels with hard geometry that kills on contact (it's made of enemies) and one demonstrating just weird shapes.
While it is possible to make a vertically scrolling level the predefined movements only really work for horizontal, left-to-right scrolling.
The worst omission IMO is the lack of powerups, you can hack something together by using enemies that drop parts this game was intended to let user creativity reign free, restricting the designer to the tumiki mechanics is not a good idea. I think it would have been enough to allow creating powerups that have a shape and change the player ship's bullet pattern (preferrably with a list which to change it to when which other pattern is installed so weapon power can be increased as well as weapons switched) but no such option made it in.
Topic: Blast Works (Read 5639 times)
