Quick Review: ShipLord

Questing for quasar amidst asteroid fields! Oh, there’s villains too I guess.

How practical - the quasar orbs even have their own little
included timer. Nice to know!

Developed by EGAMER, Published by SA Industry and released on December 2nd, 2015, ShipLord presents a near future where planets thrive by collecting “quasar”, little orbs of space energy that appear wherever there are asteroids. Planet Earth, whose inhabitants are now capable of spacefaring, must now be sustained by those orbs. However, where some collect quasar to survive, others gather it to grow in power, which is the goal of an enemy alien race, the Kryp, intent on taking the energy for themselves.

Is it kind of ironic that the Shield option is your only
proper "offensive" method against the packs of
asteroids coming our way?

In spite of this description seemingly putting a lot of emphasis on the enemies, this game isn’t actually a shmup; at least not a conventional one. Focus is far more on gathering the resources and facing the asteroids, to the point that the ship doesn’t have any weapons. You move around with the arrows, the mouse or a joystick in order to collect the quasar, which appears for a few seconds before vanishing. Touching an asteroid is instant death, and you have to survive two minutes (120 seconds) in each level. The threshold of scoring is the same in every level: A Bronze medal at 70 quasar spheres collected, then up the ranks to Silver at 90, Gold at 100, Platinum at 105 and, finally, Diamond at 110. The higher rank you get, the more ships you unlock at the Shipyard (better ships are locked behind tougher level requirements), and the more upgrade points you obtain to improve the ship.

On the right: The "boss". All over the screen: DEATH.

Force field in action: The asteroids are not
moving anymore. Okay, it's kinda hard to
tell on a still image...

The ship also has three special abilities, unlocked early on. The first creates a shield around the ship, letting it destroy asteroids on contact for a few seconds; the second is a force field that stops asteroids from moving for a moment; and the third is an energy collector that instantly picks up every orb of quasar currently on the screen, useful if any are about to vanish. Through upgrades, you can decrease the cooldown time for each skill. Still no weapon, and on top of that, bosses strip you of these three abilities, leaving you toonly dodge their attacks. These bosses are kind of bland, really, and much like in a regular level, you only need to survive for two minutes, and the enemy ship is automatically destroyed by an asteroid. Yay, I guess? (The one difference is that you can aim for a better reward against the boss by increasing its difficulty on the level select menu, i.e. more bullets to avoid and tighter passages to move through between bullets.)

So if I want a ship that's more like the Millennium
Falcon or something else... no? Not even a cheap
simile or reference copy? Well, damn it.

Yeah, it’s kinda bland. The idea is certainly novel, and the difficulty curve is a steady upwards line (each new level just has more/bigger asteroids than the previous one, basically). That said, once the three ship abilities are unlocked, the remainder of the game plays pretty much the same. Sure, you get upgrade points to improve, and better ships (though the look of the ship barely changes between models, and the only other change is the percentage of cooldown reduction you get from it), but little else changes. As the game is mostly ships, floating rocks, headshots and boss ships, there isn’t much there visually; the saving grace here is the backdrops, which are pretty sights of distant planets. The game also includes a few bonus levels to be unlocked, though I haven’t figured out how.

So, bad? Eh… More like meh. I didn’t run into any major gameplay issues or glitches, the game is well-made, balanced, and at least tries to do well on all fronts. The end result isn’t too memorable nonetheless, so I personally wouldn’t recommend. (Also, especially not at its regular price tag; I don’t believe it’s worth that much.)

ShipLord can be purchased on Steam for 10.99$ USD.