Shallow Space: Insurgency Preview

It’s very early days for Shallow Space, so much so that its Indiegogo campaign is still running at time of writing. However, they offered us a chance to preview it and we took it! The build we took a look at was only a single-level demo, but it shows promise.

Shallow Space is an RTS which sees you commanding a few flotilla of space ships made up of a few wings each. You can command each flotilla or each wing separately, moving them in three dimensions across the map. If you want to do a Kirk vs Khan-type maneuver, you can! Kinda - it’s mainly long-range battles at this point, with your ships opening fire with lasers and rockets across vasti distances if you want them to.

The graphics are the strongest point of this game at the moment in all honesty. There’s too little substance to judge it properly, but even now the ship models are something special. The team at Special Circumstances have put a lot of work into the detail of the ships, which they tactfully show off in the tutorial videos, and can be seen with the level of zoom available in-game.

However, this does mean the gameplay is the weak point. As it stands, the game is boring as it is so threadbare. It is still very early days and they assure us that more features are coming, but this is little more than a tech demo. There will be an option to speed things up, but in this build it is simply too monotonous. I kept letting myself get distracted while my flotilla were slowly making their way across the map to take on the enemy ships that were trying to destroy the station in the middle. Combat is similarly tedious, as it is all automatic. You can set the ships to defend themselves or attack, with some ships having longer-range attacks than others, but apart from that there isn’t much strategy to it yet. It’s easy to lose track of ships if watching from afar, especially as there is largely no reason to control individual wings.

The music is repetitive but largely forgettable and easily muted - hopefully this will change too. Sounds from ships only occurs when you’re zoomed close to the action, so if you’re watching an overview of the battle you are left with basically silence.

Shallow Space: Insurgency has promise - especially since they’re so early in development and have made promises. There’s a lot of work that needs doing, but I’ll reiterate - it currently looks really good. The free demo is available here so you can give it a try yourself.