'BossConstructor' released in full, create your own spaceships and take them into battle

'BossConstructor' [Steam, Official Site] is an indie spaceship building and combat simulator that was in Early Access for some time, but now it's released in full!

Note: Copy personally purchased.

The game has a few different game modes, so there's plenty of fooling around to do in space.

I've put a little bit of time into the main Exploration mode and it's not bad. Travelling from sector to sector upgrading my ship as I go and solving various missions. The missions vary, but it usually involves destroying another ship with other objectives thrown in, like collecting resources. I just couldn't feel much excitement from this mode, as it felt a bit slow. The other modes are quite a bit more interesting.

The combat is actually quite challenging, as your ships slide about all over the place. When you fire your weapons your ship will be moved by them too. With a wide assortment of weapons and ship designs to come up against, the combat is pretty good.

I'm just not sold on the camera controls, they don't feel quite right. When following your ship, it's not always quite right, I would prefer to keep it always in the centre. The free camera mode is nice, but requires constant scrolling leaving a hand away from either weapons or ship movement. I feel it needs some tighter camera work to make me enjoy it more.

The game has over 60 blocks you can use to build your ship with, and more can be unlocked as you progress through the game. Creating a ship is a snap, as blocks just snap together nicely and the variety is really great. I've seen some really wacky designs on the Steam Workshop. I shall be doing what I always do; trying to make the Battlestar Galactica, or maybe the Enterprise. I always end up making the "USS Terrible" or something, as I'm crap at designing something good-looking.

Issues
I couldn't get the game to actually go into fullscreen. It seems to use Java, so I'm not surprised as Java games never seem to have good fullscreen support for me. It could be related to having multiple monitors, but it always stayed in windowed mode.

It also doesn't seem to work with the Steam Overlay.

Both issues have been reported to the developer.

Overall, I found the ship editor and testing to be really fun, but the rest of the modes aren't well explained and feel a little clumsy due to this. It's not clear what modes can use your pre-made ships and what can't. I feel a better menu would solve this entirely, but it's still pretty cool. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.