The Dutch game studio Tense Games added direct ship control to Stellar Warfare last Thursday. You can now fly individual ships as you would in Freelancer, Elite Dangerous or Star Wars: Tie Fighter – quite unique for a real-time strategy game!
Stellar Warfare has been released into early access on August 4 2021 after three years of development, with a lot of features added to the game since then. There are weekly updates, constant polishing and the occasional quality of life improvement.
Earlier Tense Games already added a coop wave defence and a single-player base assault game mode to the RTS. Strategy games usually don’t have third person controls for units. It would be akin to being able to play a shooter with an archer in Age of Empires 4.
In its current state, the feature is fairly basic. The developer plans to improve upon this feature more in the future.
“Right now the direct control mode is fairly basic. It wasn’t even a planned feature. But every now and then you have to do something fun for the project you are working on to keep the creative ideas flowing. In the future, I’d like it to function like the fighter controls in Elite Dangerous or Freelancer”.
In addition to the new direct control feature, the building construction also received a rework. Buildings now have proper animations while being constructed which improves the visuals drastically.
Features:
- Cinematic camera, stunning visuals, epic soundtrack
- Direct control mode of units
- A fully explorable and exploitable 3D environment allows for intricate Combat maneuvers
- The player can unlock over 50 ships, 40 weapons and 30 modules to customize their fleet with
- Loads of replay value
- Cinematic fleet battles
- Up to 10 different ship configurations
- Base building
- Resource gathering
- Multi-player 1v1
- Pretty flak fields!
- Multi-player FFA
- Single-player Skirmish
- Single-player Wave Defense
- Multi-player Battle Royale
- Loot & customization
Stellar Warfare features a wide variety of single and multiplayer game modes. These include a small single-player campaign, a single-player skirmish and a single-player wave defence mode. In addition to this, there is also a multiplayer skirmish mode, a coop wave defence mode, a base assault mode, a multiplayer battle royale game mode. The game has been covered by YouTubers such as SplatterCatGaming, Raptor and DiplexHeated.
The game can be bought and downloaded on https://store.steampowered.com/app/1113030/Stellar_Warfare.
The official patch for the mentioned features can be found here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1113030/view/3147453721000332821