Designed and developed by Bearded Giant Games, Space Mercs is an extreme arcade space combat game like some of the classics and it's out now with Linux support.
As a reminder, Bearded Giant Games have been developing Space Mercs entirely on Linux with the Unity game engine. Working from a low-powered Notebook, they've put a special amount of attention into the optimizations so it should work great across a huge variety of systems. It certainly does look good, with an impressive atmosphere to it!
Feature Highlight:
- Huge, real-time, space ship battles, with up to hundreds of spaceships on screen at the same time
- Mission battles range from small (3-10 ships) and scale up into the gigantic sector wide battles (400-500 ships)
- Single-player campaign where the stakes increase with every mission
- Thousands of projectiles on screen at every time
- Consistent graphics and performance even on really low hardware specs
- Shooter-style control and flight system optimized for Keyboard and Gamepad use
- Instant battle mode where you are thrown in a procedural generated battle of epic scales
- Loadout system for ship weaponry and internal systems
- Coffee-break design where you can pickup and play in short 3 to 10 minute sessions
- Functional cockpit display
As a surprise feature announced along with the release, Space Mercs includes a Battle Designer. Once you complete the main missions, it will allow you to make custom battles to participate in with up to 4000 ships. The developer provided some interesting screenshots taken from that mode (click to enlarge):
If you enjoy classic arcade space action, Space Mercs should be on your radar. It would be worth reading their release info post, which contains a few extra important bits of info (especially for owners of an AMD Vega GPU). Also, do check out our previous interview with Bearded Giant Games here.
You can find Space Mercs on Steam. With an itch.io release due later.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: GuestWell the 4000 ship battle kind of slows to a crawl for me. I wasn't really expecting anything different. But that would be amazing amounts of fun if I could lob brute force computing power at it.
Have some trouble with IFF on the later levels - enemy ships and targets aren't having indicators displayed. Fortunately, just shoot at whatever looks to be an enemy and it kind of goes ok.
I appreciate the effort that each mission feels different too. Thoroughly enjoyed playing through them all. Now to go back over it and try out the different weapons, and see just how much I can poke at it to get as many ships on screen as I can and still be playable.
Hang on tight, cause yesterday I just prototype the first content update for the game that's going to diversify things a bit! Might go into beta as early as next weekend.
As for 4000 ships battle, yeah, if you're on integrated graphics and/or low spec like me, I think you can go as high as 700 ships. Some more optimizations on my side for the next patches with fixes might kick it up a bit more :)
Quoting: CyrilI'll buy it for sure when it's available on itch.io!If that's just to support the dev more (i had the same plan ^^) - zapa says it helps more to buy (and review) now on steam to raise visibility :)
I can describe them as squares painted all over the screen; at first i thought it was intentional, but they are not.
Can't post a screenshot, because i will be at home only in 2 weeks.
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