Distant Star: Revenant Fleet is an Early Access title to keep an eye on

Blazing Griffin’s Scott Boyd gives us some pointers on how to die less often!

I’ve tried to keep one eye on Blazing Griffin’s lovely looking real-time space strategy game Distant Star: Revenant Fleet for a while now, however, the slippery devil somehow managed to sneak past me and make it onto Steam Early Access.

If you’re first hearing about the title, it’s been described as similar to the incredibly popular FTL, but on a much larger scale and instead of managing a crew, you’ll be busy managing a fleet of ships through a dynamically generated galaxy.

Early reports are already coming in that Distant Star‘s difficulty curve is a bit on the high end of the scale at this stage with Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Alec Meer stating the game is “currently as hard as a really hard thing. Think of something hard. No, harder. Yeah, that’s it.”

Knowing that the Destructoid Community is no stranger to challenging games, I still thought it would be worthwhile to check in with Blazing Griffin’s Scott Boyd and ask for a few pointers he’d suggest to those who might prefer to die just a bit less often in the game.

Scott’s tips for new players:

• Combat scales based on the size of your fleet you take in. So even though you can you get three ships at the start, you don’t need to take them all.
• Assault ship is a good all-rounder with missiles to do decent damage and cannons to take out faster moving ships and drones.
• Tech / Puslar have beam weapons which are slower, but powerful. Tech ship also has a targeted AE damage, while the Pulsar has a targeted AE heal.
• Lancer is a sniper class – while other ships autofire their weapons, Lancer is targeted only (but high damage).
• Shields recharge if they don’t take fire for a few seconds.
• Red circles = incoming various flavours of death, so move out of the way!

“Right now, the most effective strategy is to keep your ships moving – missiles take your ships out pretty quickly, but moving can avoid them,” says Scott. “We’re tweaking this part of the gameplay though and there are a number of things we’re looking at (for example, a pause function to allow players allocate commands while paused). We don’t have this confirmed yet though as we’re reviewing the implications this will have on gameplay / balancing.”

Currently, the game is admittedly stripped down with some of the final features tentatively scheduled for implementation sometime in February or March, so if you’re looking to buy into a fully fleshed-out game, you may want to hold out until it leaves Early Access.

With that being said, if you are the sort that likes to get involved with a game’s development through the program, roguelikes are a great genre to play around with in Early Access as spoiling the game for yourself is much less of an issue.

If you’d like to learn more about this promising title, you can visit Blazing Griffin’s main site, or hit up the game’s Steam page for more details.