Developer: Blendo Games

Publisher: Blendo Games

Platform: Windows (Reviewed), XBLA

Flotilla is a game about capital ship battles in space, with the lighthearted mood and pacing of Shrapnel Games’ Weird Worlds series. Pirate chickens, space pigs, and other oddities spring up in your journey across the galaxy in search of things to fight and spaceship parts to salvage. Developed by the creators of Gravity Bone, Flotilla is a more traditional game in that it imitates the recognizable three-dimensional space combat of Homeworld. While exhibiting some appreciation for the details in maneuvers that would be performed in capital ship battles, the combat’s lack of depth and limited options for ship customization detract from what could be a significant addition to the strategy genre. Instead, Flotilla leaves one wondering when a developer brave enough to combine and tune every exciting, disparate concept in strategy game development will create a a work to revitalize the genre.

In Flotilla, the player is “armed with nothing but a bone to pick and seven months left to live.” What’s a freelancing space pilot to do in such a situation? A small cluster of planets are initially revealed, including an optional tutorial mission, and the player is free to explore any of them. Flotilla gives an orange, ethereal tint to the expansive nothingness of space, rendering the ships in simple combinations of geometric shapes. The soothing sounds of a piano play in the background as ships let slip their payloads and clouds of metal fragments explode in the resolution of battle.

Adventures in Flotilla are typically short, and they end abruptly—either from facing an unbeatable enemy with a meager armada or from your mysterious terminal illness. Every time the game ends, the player can start a new adventure with a randomized assortment of planets to explore and spacefaring animals to fight. In Flotilla nothing is long term. This is Minesweeper in space. Clicking on planets to expose friend or foe and then engaging in space battles, hoping to survive long enough to build a flotilla.

The space battles are entertaining, if only for a short while. They are in line with what we would expect of “real” space combat, in stark contrast with Homeworld and the naval battles of Star Wars: Empire at War. It takes a realistic approach to out-maneuvering opponents instead of reflexively adopting the standard strategy of taking opponents head-on and relying on strength in numbers. Such a strategy is impossible by design in Flotilla, because opponents and the strength of the player’s flotilla are randomized. The player’s flotilla always starts as two ships, with the ability to earn more ships and ship upgrades through planetary exploration.

Combat takes place as “turn-based simultaneous action”; the player receives a turn and orders each of her ships to move, attack, or flank, then the player and AI ships perform their actions at the same time. Movement is allowed in three dimensions, but there are limits to how far a ship can go in each direction per turn. The controls are counterintuitive for those familiar with genre titles like Homeworld and real time strategy: the WASD configuration is used for left-right lateral movement and zooming in and out, yet the mousewheel is used for up and down vertical movement. Even though the maps are sparsely decorated, objects and space debris still manage to get in the way of seeing ships when rotating the camera and issuing commands.

Flotilla assumes all power has been diverted to forward shields (how often have you heard that phrase in a science fiction film?), so all craft are indestructible from the front or top. The trick in Flotilla is to out-flank your opponents by getting behind or underneath them. Conversely, the defense tactics are to keep diving so that your opponent can never get below you, or to roll your ship so that the underside of the ship is never exposed.  With larger capital ships, this is much harder to do in practice because of their reduced maneuverability. Placing smaller ships on the front line going in opposite directions to create distracting targets is often the safest strategy.

At first, this authority over the dynamics of movement in spaceship combat is extremely satisfying, because it makes you feel like you are performing an important function instead of directing a cluster of spacecraft to their inevitable deaths while at the mercy of the typical pathfinding of real time strategy.

But upon inspection, the combat is exposed as lacking substance and depth. Since there are no ships smaller than a cruiser, there isn’t much for the player to worry about except forming an appropriate blockade to protect the weaker gunships and diverting attacks against capital ships. Homeworld allowed the construction of smaller fighters, and the large capital ships in Empire at War were equipped with launch bays that would supply groups of fighters to the ongoing battle. Other similar “hard points” like shield generators, weapons, or engines could be specifically targeted by smaller, maneuverable ships and fighters before moving in with larger gunships for the kill. By contrast, for all the flourishes in movement and positioning, the combat in Flotilla is usually resolved in a couple of lucky shots once the player’s ships are in position.

Even as the player builds up a fleet of ships, there is a possibility that the next encounter could be the last. The recently introduced “Hardcore” mode allows for longer adventures, bigger flotillas and tougher enemies, but this is simply a lateral expansion of the game’s systems. Why couldn’t the player fight space battles into infinity, like the random dungeon generators of recent Rogue-likes? It’s not like more planets, characters, and encounters couldn’t be generated given the simple and streamlined technology used for the game’s engine.

Since Flotilla’s focus is on “Orbital Battleship Maneuvers” and not on developing a story, the game would lend itself well to adding depth to the space combat, ship customization, and flotilla development. The stakes need to be made higher: the random formation of a flotilla, as well as its total destruction on a whim, pushes the player away from the game, because she has no control over the most important part of it. Allowing the capture of ships—if odds in a battle are overwhelmingly in the player’s favor, for example—would let the player construct a flotilla that was earned, not obtained by chance.

The combat maneuvers in Flotilla belong inside a bigger, more complex game about capital ship battles in space. Flotilla is only part of a game with a unique visual aesthetic—but even that feels under-developed, with its plain-looking ships and lack of variety in the environments. The salient point of Flotilla is the tactical movement during combat, where the player must learn the unconventional movement system. Doing so doesn’t take long. Once it is mastered, the player rarely sees a battle that is insurmountable if in possession of a flotilla of four ships or more.. Combine Flotilla with the detailed shipcraft and fleet building of Gratuitous Space Battles, and Flotilla might be the start of something worth serious consideration.

To its detriment, Flotilla never complicates matters. Since its playthroughs are intended to be kept short, there is no investment of attention required from the player. The game is merely a vehicle for some interesting features. It is ephemeral.

The game’s odd presentation may be alluring to some, but charm is not what is required from a space battle strategic simulation. After recognizing the limitations of the game’s strategic system, what felt like charm just seems like so much window-dressing to distract from Flotilla’s limitations as a game. Revisiting a formula that hasn’t seen much use since Homeworld is an admirable endeavor, but after only a few rounds of Flotilla the question is not whether Blendo Games achieved this goal; rather, it is whether they had any aspirations for this game in the first place.

Score: 6/10

Disclosure: Steam version provided for review by Blendo Games. Played the game for five hours.