Charge your engines, make sure your laser cannons fire, and hit the afterburner as you launch yourself into space. As you blast through the dark, cold, vastness of space, you turn your ship towards the nearest planet. As you veer towards the celestial being in the night, you begin to see contact explosions. You set your course for the fight in our preview for Infinity: Battlescape.
From publisher and developer I-Novae Studios, LLC comes a massive undertaking in the space combat arena with Infinity: Battlescape. In a procedurally created solar system that is true-to-scale, you will engage in massive space battles against enemies, but also with your team as well. This system holds all sorts of different locations to visit from gas giants to asteroid fields, and other types of celestial bodies as you try to defeat the other team.
Control-wise, Battlescape is pretty simple and it plays like older flight games like X-Wing Alliance and even mimics controls that are reminiscent of Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed. The QWE and ASD buttons control forward, backward, rolls, left, and right, while RF controls you moving up and down with your thrusters. The mouse controls all of your yaws and is your reticle for firing your weapons, while left-clicking will fire your guns and the middle mouse button will fire rockets. Other keys will control warp jumps and targeting and are all fairly simple to learn.
It is a team-based multiplayer game right now, and you will need teammates to fight against other ships. The basic fighters are interceptors and bombers, while there are larger ships such as the corvettes that you will be able to use and fight against. These ships are not weak either, so I feel there may be some balance issues. I had a hard time taking out simple fighters with my fighter or bomber. The more ships you destroy, however, the more money you will earn to level up your ship types and their modifications.
There are some voice-chat that I have heard, and they are still trying to implement team text chat on their road map. There are a ton of short term items that are in the works for the next one to three weeks, some things by the end of the year like ship upgrades and electronic warfare, and before full release with items like solo mode and more. It is an exciting time to be getting into a new space combat game like this at the ground level, and being able to see how the early access process will work for it. Content like side missions is something that most games have, but it is something that the company is still trying to figure out at this time. I am eagerly awaiting the solo sandbox mode, and hope it has some kind of story to go along with the graphics and ship mechanics they have chosen to employ in this space-combat shooter. It was fun to get into and I hope for bigger things from it.
We didn’t obtain a review key for this game and are previewing it as a purchased game.
Overall, it shows promise, and I have always had fun in games like this and Elite Dangerous. I hope others will have fun with it as well. It is on Steam in Early Access after a successful launch on September 27th. It will normally sell for $34.99 USD but is currently being offered at 5% off for $33.24 USD. If you haven’t purchased it yet, try and watch a bit of it on a streaming channel and see what you think. You may decide to wait until it launches with everything that will make it a great game.