Concealed Intent, a turn-based strategy with a rather interesting mechanic for online play

Sadly it got buried in my inbox, so apologies to the developer on this, but Concealed Intent [Steam] is a game you should check out.


The game is about searching for your enemy’s capital ship in space, utilizing various modules on your ship like sensors, sending out drones and so on. You can confuse each other with these modules depending on how you use them and end up sending your enemy chasing decoys which is fun.

It has a single-player campaign which is awesome to see, but the real fun is the online play. The fun thing about the online play is that you don’t need the other player to be online to make your turn, as it will notify them on Steam that it’s their turn. I think it’s a fantastic system, that reminds me of mechanics you found in some older games (think play by email). It’s actually a feature of Steam itself, which I’ve never seen another game use.

I tested this with GOL editor Samsai and the turn notification feature seems to work perfectly. It will give you a pop-up notification on Steam and a page like this when it’s your turn:

Although, it does need tweaking not to give you a Steam pop-up when you're actually in-game, as it's a little annoying.

Sadly, the game actually has a number of silly issues issues, which reduced our enjoyment of it. The netcode in the game itself is a problem. We had a game where it just seemed to utterly desync, with it not doing as it was told for either of us and sometimes doing nothing for an entire turn and wiping our commands we sent it.

We confused the game a bit as well, by challenging each other at the same time and it just sort of failed to do anything. The game wouldn’t load as it seemed confused on which game it was loading.

Another issue was that at one point, Samsai also couldn’t see his own ship, the ship model just didn’t appear.

The audio in the game is also an issue, with me repeatedly getting no audio at all until I randomly adjust any audio level to anything and it suddenly kicks in.

The Steam Overlay also did not work for me, but did work for Samsai.

A fantastic idea marred by lots of nuisance bugs. We did still enjoy some of it, as our last game ended in a draw. We both launched all of our drones at each other and — boom! Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.