Explosions! Flashing control panels! Screaming at incompetents who can’t put out that electrical fire! If this sounds like your idea of a good time, you have a little over a week to make it happen.
Flagship wants to put you in a glass-walled bridge tower atop a huge starship, giving orders to the bridge crew seated at duty stations all around you, and monitoring the results of your tactics on a big command and control display table in the center of the bridge.
If the Kickstarter for this game can deliver what it’s promising, Flagship will be a sci-fi geek’s dream come true, the bridge drama of Battlestar Galactica combined with the real-time fleet-based strategy of Homeworld.
There have been previous attempts to create the Star Trek geek’s fantasy of being the Captain on the bridge of a starship, running the whole show through barking orders at the helmsman, or the weapons officer, or telling your first officer to go tell everyone else to do the stuff you just told them to do.
Artemis Bridge Simulator requires a bunch of people to network their computers together, however, which just isn’t tenable for most gamers, we’d imagine. If you want a bridge simulator where you sit around yelling at your friends, the mobile game Spaceteam might be to your liking (Spaceteam is also free).
There are 10 days left in Flagship’s crowdfunding campaign, and it’s a little short of half the funding goal, which is sadly not unusual this year: Kickstarter funding for video games is half of what it was last year.
If you’re looking for an experience akin to what Artemis Bridge Simulator and Spaceteam offer, Flagship is designed to support the Oculus VR rig. We hope that Flagship doesn’t require the Oculus to deliver a fully-engrossing experience, however, just in case no one decides they want or can afford it.
Image courtesy of Urban Logic Games