[promo title=]Mighty Tactical Shooter is set to blow your mind on what ‘hardcore’ shooters are all about – one agonising second at a time…[/promo]
Some hardcore shooter fans would have us believe it’s all about reflexes, attack patterns and timing. Those are certainly important facets of the hardcore shooter experience. One indie developer, Johnny Marshall (AKA The Mighty Git), is a firm believer in tactics and planning, and seeing how he’s incorporated those into Mighty Tactical Shooter proved to be a real eye opener for gamers at EGX Rezzed.
Picture a side-scrolling retro 2D shooter with an actively hostile environment and the usual swarms of enemies. Things are happening fast, of course…But what if they weren’t? Imagine that every move you make in your ship, from firing weapons to moving around the screen, is done on a turn-based system. Bullets and enemies can be misdirected with gravity fields; your flight path trajectory shows where it will cross into enemy lines of fire; your shield, health and weapon systems are all activated and prioritized according to your choice of settings.
That’s Mighty Tactical Shooter and, yes, it does sound very bloody weird indeed. But it works.
“Turning a twitch game into a turn-based game is like, ‘right, let’s take two opposing mechanics, ram them together and see what happens’,” says Marshall, “And it turned out, when I made the prototype, that it felt OK! So I felt that I had to make the game exist at that point. I can’t leave it alone now that it’s shown its colours and each time I start working on it, doing a bit more, the more it opens up.”
Boss fights are a great example. After every move the player makes , whether it’s launching a missile or moving their ship, the game pauses and a group of menus pop up. Movement can be plotted in tandem with weapons deployment and, depending on the weapon selected, the targeted areas.
Far from simplifying things, Marshall has taken this as an opportunity to introduce gamers to bullet hell. Bosses are capable of firing hundreds of projectiles at a time, making the move-by-move mechanics an absolute necessity and turning encounters that would last a few seconds into tactical battles that last for minutes. It has also meant that, rather than equip players with a couple of weapons to be used in a rapid-fire approach, Marshall has been able to give them access to cluster missiles, single missiles, lasers, gravity wells, one-way firing systems, three-way firing systems and more besides.
In some ways it’s overwhelming, but this system makes every enemy encounter – from the little guys to the big, bullet-spewing bosses – a powerful event in which the player must decide how to handle themselves. “When I go through the boss fights, most of them take barely a minute to do. I wasn’t expecting people to spend quite as long as they did on the boss fights, but then I know their weaknesses and I know their patterns,” Marshall explains, “Seeing people actually engage with [Mighty Tactical Shooter] has been brilliant, because it’s shown me where I can improve the experience.”
Mighty Tactical Shooter is tentatively scheduled for release later this year and is (so far) aimed to launch on PC, MAC, Linux and Tablet. Visit the MTS site or subscribe to Sock Thuggery’s YouTube channel to see more.