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Artillery Isles Review

Rating:

Another Ludum Dare 17 entry with a nice, fast-paced twist on strategy games. Destroy your enemy's island bases while keeping your own together using resource management and tactical nukes.

Full Review

Ah, the wonders of game developer competitions. I've tried making my own games on multiple occasions and given up each time, so the prospect of developing my own game in a short, strict time frame seems nosebleed-inducing. That said, Artillery Isles is a very impressive game to be developed in so small an amount of time. The concept is simple: shoot rockets at your opponents islands, shoot rockets to destroy the rockets heading to your islands, and subjugate the surrounding islands until your opponent has no more islands.

Anyone who played Introversion's wonderful Defcon game will be familiar with the click-to-launch mechanic of lobbing rockets and missiles at the enemy. What makes Artillery Isles fun and different is the frantic pace at which you must launch these WMDs. You click from island to island, launching missiles with the right mouse button. The pace is fast and getting dumped into your first game with little expectation of what is about to happen provides a nice bit of a thrill. Each launcher is on a timer so you cannot launch them too quickly and will also cost you $50. Who knew nukes were so cheap?

In between the clicking and the launching, there is the additional component of keeping up with your available resources and spending them wisely, such as on building a new base on another island. This is beneficial because you not only get more launching points, you also get additionally resources (generated every few seconds) from each of your islands.

What starts as a seemingly simple but fun, fast-paced strategy game becomes rather deep and quickly requires a good deal of thought. You cannot mindlessly click and launch missiles; you have to be strategic about how rapidly you deploy them, when you choose not to launch and repair your existing bases, and if/when you take a new island. The fast pace keeps you on your toes and makes the game quite exciting.

Entar has taken a simple premise (islands, of all things) and, i a short amount of time, made a truly fun and rather original strategy game. Graphically there is little going on and stage variation is null - each is the same set of islands rearranged, plus or minus a few. However, you will be too busy shooting missiles to think about these petty things, especially if you consider that it was made in 48 hours. Download the game from this website.

Posted by Derek Kamal on April 27, 2010 Comments (1)


Entar said at 2010-04-30 13:02:

I'm glad you enjoyed the game :)