Astro Battle - Gameplay

Gameplay

The objective of Astro Battle is to destroy other player’s ships in multi-player online matches. The game features standard Multi-directional shooter gameplay with several innovations.

Astro Battle's gameplay deviates from that of traditional Shoot 'em ups in that, rather than provide pre-designed space ships which are then customised by a limited selection of weapons on pre-selected hardpoints, players must design a star fighter in the included ship editor. Astro Battle gives you a large number of parts, including cockpits, trusses, thrusters, guns, batteries and fusion power reactors, each with their own attributes, and the attributes of spacecraft are determined entirely by the modules used in construction and the arrangement of these modules. Each module has a cost and weight associated with it. Weight affects ship speed and manoeuvrability, and no ship may exceed a certain cost.

Players must take these parts and connect them together via set ‘mount points’ on each module to create viable combat craft.

Many modules require player input to be useful. For example, guns and thrusters are useless unless the player can control them, and some parts have special uses: Reserve energy tanks, for example, can be activated by the player. For these to function, the player must 'wire' these modules to control keys so that, for example, a thruster on the left wing will fire when the right key is pressed, or a machine gun will fire when a fire button is pressed.

In battle, the aim is to defeat other players in online matches, flying ships around one of a number of battle arenas. Gameplay in this part of the game is reminiscent of Star Control 2 melee mode. One feature of the game is the ability to destroy individual components of a ship. It's possible, for example, to cause specific thrusters to stop functioning, hindering movement of an enemy ship, or to destroy specific weapons, preventing their use in combat, or to destroy a specific structural element, causing whole parts of the ship to fall off, rendering them inoperable. To score a point as a kill, players must destroy the cockpit or bridge of the opposing ship.

There are many guilds in Astro Battle, each of which is only a loose collection of players interested in playing together. In general, they have little effect on game play for most members. But as more people begin to join of opposing guilds the game play can become quite intense at times.