Build a fleet and go to war in Battlevoid: Sector Siege, now out with Linux support

Battlevoid: Sector Siege [Steam] is a real-time strategy game about spaceships battling it out, it's now out with Linux support.

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Disclosure: Key provided by the developer.

While it's not going to win awards for being innovative, this small-scale strategy game is actually quite fun. As a huge RTS fan, it was an absolutely no-brainer for me to look at it. Something about building up some sort of army and watching the fireworks excites me.

The story for the campaign is pretty standard, humans reached for the stars and encountered aliens, all of which turned hostile so you're now going on the offensive. Nothing truly exciting or interesting there, it really could have done with a bit more of a build up really. Anyway, you don't generally play such a strategy game for the story, more for the pew-pew.

What I really like about the game, is how much customization there is on offer. Each time you build a ship or a station, you get to pick exactly what weapons and modules they will have. Will your new ship be designed to take down shields quickly, to wreck their hulls or to send in support craft? There's a lot of freedom and a lot of options available to you, with more to unlock as you progress.

It's not exactly a fast-paced game though, even though the battles are small in scale and the action is always pretty close, a single mission can easily end up taking an hour or more. This is down to the speed of your ships, which is pretty darn slow. There is a research system, which you can use to upgrade the speed of your ships, their shields and so on, but that takes a while too. Thankfully, research done is automatically applied to all your ships, so there's less annoying micro-management.

The mini-map though, what a nuisance. There's no box on it to show where screen is in relation to the map as a whole. It might seem like a small thing, but in a strategy game where you moving around often it really would help to know exactly where you're looking at all times.

I'm also not a big fan of the control system. In most RTS games you pick a group, hover over an enemy and click to attack. In Battlevoid: Sector Siege that will simply move your units to that position and they will fire at any enemy within range. You have to micro-manage their weapons, since some are good against shields and some against the hull. When you left click an enemy ship, you can pick the weapon types to attack with them. It ends up very micro-heavy due to this. It's not terrible, just different and a lot more clicking involved.

Overall, it's not the most exciting strategy game, but there's far worse out there. It needs a fair few tweaks to really make it great. Hopefully the developer will keep tweaking it to improve it, as it has a lot of promise.

Sorry for being late on this, moving house takes a long time.