Hi, We are Tindalos Interactive, a French indie games studio based in Paris. We just released our first game, Stellar Impact, an online multiplayer game, PC only! To learn more about the game you'll find:
- The official website.
- The Stellar Impact forum.
To review the game, you can register on the official website to get 10 trial multiplayer battles.
Regards and GG!
Romain Clavier - Tindalos Interactive
This game looks fun sadly there seem to be nearly no players online?
We're doing our best to gather players around the game, but its just the hardest part of the work. We are doing the necessary to be on the digital download platforms.
Besides you can easily find games in the evening.
Regards!
I have played the trial version and im afraid to say unless this game gets some serious attention you will really struggle to actually sell this product let alone give it away for free or even build a player base, i offer this criticism not maliciously but for you to improove your work and eventually make a product worthy of release. Your current build at the moment weather it is a final build or you are already working on patches im unsure, suffice to say the game as it currently is - is awful put bluntly. Graphics are nice sure, interface is a disaster, GUI is awful, controls are limited and non responsive, and the game is lacking any community with just 13 - 20 players per time i have been on and also the fact that its released as a multiplayer only game. This product is going to get no where.
point 1 - The controls... The controls are chaotic,i think perhaps you have designed them to be similar to a space sim, yet you have used a RTS like top down view, a simple right click interface would be much better suited, it took me the first 10 minutes of the multiplayer session just to work out how to go forward. Further more my enemy and allies alike could not even figure out how to fire. which brings me to point 2.
point 2 - Weapons systems, - close related to the controls of the game , the weapons are shall we say in-accurate, almost impossible to fire. Im assuming the green lines are your firing arc ? again implimenting space sim aspects to a top down view is dissasterous, this should be and RTS, the tactical capture points as far as i and also anyone else i have met thus far in game are usless, they don;t seem to serve a purpose.
3rd point - collision detection and asteroids, ships don;t even need to hit the asteroid but just past it and they blow up, also balance issues within the game need to be looked at e.g a corvette inflicting almost insta kill on a dreadnought ??? how does that work ?
4th point - AI control of support craft ?.... plain useless im afraid, my ai controlled support craft simply put ... do NOT support at all, in fact they just race into the enemy base and get pwned leaving me feeling very isolated 1 ship vs a star base + .. god knows how many weapon platforms ?.....
last final point i will allow you to work the rest out after this....
What is with the upgrades ? how long should it actually take to impliment an upgrade ? i kept checking and there seems to be some sort of scale / bar to indicate which level you are at tech wise i assume, but what is and when is anything implimented ? during the fight .. .after the fight ?
This ends my mini review / bug report.
All i really want to put across is, you should recall any games already sold shut down your servers, work out , plan and re-design aspects of this game aka either make it an RTS or make it a FPS space shooter etc...
Or at the very least patch out these major bugs which should not be released on a retail product ! if not i can guarentee you will have one ****** off angry community.
A good example of an awful game is here 3000ad.com check out the actual game tho, 3000ad didn;t know what they where making, and probably still don;t they made a game that tried to impliment elements from the likes of eve online and FPS elements from say chrome (old game based on unreal 2 engine) then they decided they wanted to make the game capable of flying a ship into an atmousphere and being able to land the ship etc.
Now i know your game is very different from my example, but the point im making is you should focus from the start when making a game one one genre, not many, because all you will end up with is a fancy gfx, but very poor content/quality game.
I hope you consider what i have wrote seriously with regards and best wishes for your future development.
Dj
Wow you are thorough, going by your review i might hold off on trying this game till am update is released lord know i don't need another space mmo that gives me a headche.
Sorry to confuse a little but its not so much an mmo that i was indicating about when refering to eve, it was more to the complexity hope that clarifies a little :).
Hi all,
I work in the Stellar Impact development team.
Thanks for your opinion Lucious but I think it is useful to bring some light over your short review.
Indeed, there are not a lot of players in the game.
We do our best to increase the community with our tight budget.
This is very difficult to be covered by the press (especially for the big) when you haven’t got a lot of money.
Nevertheless the community grows up progressively.
We know that Stellar Impact is specialized for hardcore gamers and requires a couple of games to get used to the commands.
That is why we made a practice game mode allowing the players to discover the game without being destroyed unceasingly in multiplayer battles. There is also an out game and in-game tutorial that we strongly recommend to read before launching a game.
We are planning to develop a solo and a coop mod to smooth the learning curve of the game.
There are almost one hundred people who play Stellar Impact .They have perfectly understood the game mechanics and they have a lot of fun. But they all READ THE TUTORIAL BEFORE!
In most strategy games and particularly in MOBA ones, if you start with a multiplayer game without having read the tutorial you will probably get farmed.
More precisely, basic commands are simple. Right click to give a direction to your ship, Z and S to accelerate and decelerate (like Navyfield), left click to select your enemy and space to fire.
Obviously, there are more advanced technics for expert players.
I think you did not read the entire tutorial because objectives are very strategic and have a strong impact on the map control (teleport area, creeps upgrade, etc.). They represent an innovative feature which is extremely appreciated by players.
Stellar Impact is a MOBA and not a simulation or something else. There is 5 ship classes with different roles: damages dealing, tanking, scouting…
Apparently you’re not used to DOTA-like games because in all of these games creeps start in your base and just go to the enemy base, attacking possible obstacles on their way. There are not proper IA…
I won’t get in details with the upgrades mechanisms; again, all is explained in the tutorials.
To conclude, Stellar Impact is not a melting pot of different types of games, it is simply a MOBA in space, based on maneuvers with objectives to capture.
Nevertheless thanks for your opinion, but if you had read the tutorial you would have a better understanding of the game (especially if you never played this type of games before).
I hope that this bad experience would not prevent you to come back and try the game with a different vision because I assure you that most of the players make good reviews.
Well firstly thanks for taking the time to respond, im glad you took my view in the context i wished it to be taken (e.g not offensivly), i did read some of the manual but when i first loaded the game it loaded in french which i do not understand, i assume that first dialog that popped up was asking if i wished to play tutorial or something ? if it was since i don;t read french i would have no idea, however if there is a way to replay or restart the tutorial hopefully in english i will replay and write a new review based on longer game play time and hopefully a better understanding of what MOBA / DOTA games are, and yes it is true i have never played this genre or even heard of it until now so it will be interesting to see exactly how this works.
I hope you can get back to me before the weekend as i work most days and never have much time of a night to play. cheers and all the best
Dj
No problem Lucious,
We will put default langage in english.
You can also change the langage in the option menu.
You can read the tutorial and play training game as often as you want.
See you in game :)
I'm not sure if I should be happy or sad that you guys pretty much made the exact game I've been designing, and using the same engine I was going to use! My design only had more customization options, and players would unlock new equipment/ships over time, saving them to a persistant armada.
Out of curiosity, how long ago was the project founded?
And my races where going to be more Empire/Militaristic humans VS. Space Pirates on drugs, who fly junked up pieced together ships.
And I don't mind giving you guys ideas because further design on my end is pointless now, unless I can find a unique hook.
In Stellar Impact, there are two factions, the Allies and the Axies, which is similar to what WW2 warfare games deliver.