Defect: Spaceship Destruction Kit is a game that let’s you create the most powerful ship in the galaxy piece by piece, take it into battle and then lose your ship to a traitorous crew in an endless cycle of punishment and revenge. Oh, and it has a humanoid pigeon that helps you along the way, so that’s pretty neat.
Three Phase Interactive has done a great job in crafting a fairly robust system that allows you to build some pretty incredible looking spaceships. The game says it includes 180 components that you can unlock as you play that will in turn allow you to outfit bigger, faster and more powerful ships to take on the baddies that run the universe. I still have stuff to unlock, but what you earn along the ways does keep you playing to get more loot.
The crux of the game is such that you use various components to create the ship of your dreams to complete various missions offered to you, but no matter how good that ship is, you’ll always be betrayed by your crew and have it stolen. This is a frustrating matter early on in the game, but it does serve a fairly unique purpose. Constantly losing you ship will force you to continue to experiment with different builds instead of relying on one much-loved design. Yes, I love my little Enterprise clone, but I know it’s going to be taken so I don’t grow too attached.
When you lose your ship it also means that it now exists in the game world controlled by pirate raiders. This means you are eventually going to come across it again in time, so continuing to build bigger and better ships is important to be able to take it out. As your complete missions you’ll earn cash and components that can be used during the build mode before each mission or to repair parts of your ship that can be damaged during one. When building you start with an energy core that will power your vessel (each has limited power that each subsequent component draws from), then crew quarters, followed by engines, wings, and other bits and bobs.
Each work together in different ways and you’ll always be looking to see how things play off each other. Most missions will also give you objectives that are pretty varied, so one ship may not work in certain situations very well. Perhaps you’ll need a smaller, quicker ship to keep up with others, more armor and bigger weapons to handle assaults, or shields and the like to best complete a task. What is also important to understand is that you don’t really want to build an unbeatable Star Destroyer like vessel as you know you are going to lose it. A lot of the strategy is not only in building a great ship, but implementing some sort of weakness as you’ll have to face it again in the future in combat.
While the game starts of with pretty small ships that look like fleas on the screen, you will quickly be able to build larger and larger ships. The build tools allow you to resize all the parts available to go as big as the build layout allows. If you want to build a Death Star you are more than welcome, but just remember that it may come back to bite you in the ass. Well, unless you build in an exposed port to the core that you can exploit like in that one film. Defect: Spaceship Destruction Kit also lets you build and share your ship designs with friends so you can see others and how they design and build to get more inspiration for your own creations.
Defect: Spaceship Destruction Kit has a strong underlying core that works really well, but the rest of the game is not quite perfect. The game has a bland story that ends up throwing you the same sort of missions repeated over and over again. And while I get the losing your ship bit every mission, it still feels like a dick move the more it happens. It doesn’t matter how fun a mission is when you know in the end it doesn’t even matter (you that song is stuck in your head). Many missions also feel more difficult than the need to be, especially early on when you are just learning how everything works. Controlling your ships is done with WASD with your crew can handling all the shooting, but you can take over and use the mouse to attack for more control. Also, the menus and HUD feel like something designed for a tablet more so than a PC game with a few weird design choices they went with.
Defect: Spaceship Destruction Kit is a fantastic spaceship building game that is only held game by the actual gameplay it throws at you. Missions and their difficulty are inconsistent throughout and everything would have been better suited with better gameplay and story design. As a building simulator Defect: Spaceship Destruction Kit is bloody fantastic, but as a game it does fall a bit flat. Still, there is enough here to warrant a look at for those of you looking for a fun little building game.
*A copy was provided for review*
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