Developer BCQT released Frontline Crisis earlier in August, and like a lot of smaller games it seems to have flown under the radar but if you love tower defense and top down shooting you need to play this. Note: key provided by the developer.
Made by one-person it's really impressive. You go through various levels, each being a small confined battlefield where you walk around in your big spider-mech. This mech does everything from mining to building to shooting. It's equal parts a tower defense game as it is a top-down shooter and it's pretty darn tough too. There's not often a lot of time to think and you'll be constantly on the move.
While your mech is powerful with its own weapons, the idea here is to get a few buildings down to face off against incoming waves of aliens. The problem is, your mech has to stay in place to mine resources, then move to a position where you can build which also keeps you still and defend everything you've built from the incoming onslaught.
You don't get a lot of space, which is what keeps you on your toes. You're not only limited by the screen space, since the maps are tiny, but by what "operators" you have picked. Each operator has a certain amount of space on the ground to allow you to build on, and during the pre-level setup you do a sort-of Tetris game of slotting them on the ground. And then after putting down the operators, you pick exactly what buildings will go where. So it's all about having a good pre-game plan here.
You can upgrade your operators too, enabling you to unlock more squares to build on. Not only that you can also give them abilities like increasing the HP of buildings on their squares, the ability to rebuild, insure buildings to get credits back when destroyed and more.
It's constantly engaging your full attention. Do you go and grab some resources from your mining buildings? Or do you stand and fight while powering up a offensive tower you've placed down to speed up its fire rate? Maybe you want to hop over to a power-up building to dump some resources into it to power up your mech? You can't protect everything and can only do one thing at a time. It makes it pretty darn frantic really, and the design of it is just really clever.
With the different types of enemies you have to deal with, along with some insane boss battles, there's so much action going on it's a total delight. The bosses also aren't just big enemies walking slowly towards you. Each are properly formidable with different behaviours and attack patterns.
Naturally in a game like this as you progress through the levels you will get new items, towers and more.
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Not only are you an actual moving character on the battlefield, but you'll also be in charge in some missions of protecting certain buildings. If either are destroyed, you failed and when there's lots of aliens coming across the screen at you, it's really challenging.
It's made with Godot Engine and performs well with Proton 9. The only technical issue I saw was entering your name, as it minimized the game and required some alt-tabbing to realise it pulled up an extra external text-box to enter my name in. Bit weird, but otherwise great fun. Some of the text also needs another pass over it but mostly okay, some bits just need explaining better.
To top it all off, you can even play it in local co-op if you want. This will keep you entertained for many hours. Quite a surprise and definitely deserves a lot more attention.
Available to buy on Steam.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
"Say, you know that giant mech that's been buying insurance from us?"
"Yeah. What about it?"
"I think it's lying on the forms, man. The buildings keep getting blown up! We're losing a ton of money."
"Great. So do you want to tell it we're not going to insure it any more?"
". . . Have you seen the cannons on that thing? But look, couldn't we at least bump the premiums or something?"
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