This review is a tough one, because I wanted to like this game - a lot.

The concept is a really nifty thing: Deliver tactical-pause mechanics to the same genre occupied by, say, "Homeworld." In a trailer it looks VERY cool. Guide the trajectories of fighters, use 3D space to your advantage, set up some killer pincer movements, and just generally have some real control.

That's the promise. The reality is slow, clunky, and - strategically - just like everything else. Mass your firepower, and just hammer the problem until it goes away.

The 3D nature of the game IS important. You should organize your fleet such that your ships are unlikely to bump into each other. Past that, though, maneuvering for the optimal shot is a giant pain, and a waste of time. WIth any decently mobile enemy, chasing them down and specifying them as a designated target is an exercise in near futility. You'll end up just going around in circles or "S" curves, all the while being chewed up by whatever is not the designated target. The "turn-rhythm" of the game is such that it tends to produce stalemate, with designated enemies in and out of firing arcs long before your ships decide to actually shoot at anything.

You're far better off just allowing your fleet to fire at anything they think they can hit, while keeping your ships able to support each other. This means that all the fancy maneuver mechanics can be reduced to a few variations: Everybody turns in a clockwise circle, everybody turns in a counterclockwise circle, or some ships turn one way and the other ships go the opposite way. (The "movement limits" represenation was actually done really well, by the way, even if it could be hard to click on the ship you actually wanted if a big crowd had formed.)

A major contributor to the "clunk" factor is that all non-movement commands go through the HUD interface, with basically zero provision for "context." For instance, designating an enemy to chase down and fire upon should be a matter of right-clicking the enemy and selecting something from a short menu. Instead, it's a chore involving finding the enemy you want, finding the designated fire button, clicking on it, and not really getting much helpful feedback as to what's going on. Shortcut keys do help a bit, but the whole thing realy ought to have been more direct. Missile fire is even worse, with a target designation system which zooms into an enemy (completely breaking your contextual sene of the battle). While you can click directly on a foe to designate them, the "enemy to shoot at picker" is designed around two buttons: Previous and Next. That's fine when there are a few enemies on the map...and horrific when there are tens of them.

And, of course, the auto zoom from the target picker often means that finding the target you want becomes a ponderous, multi-step process instead of a snappy one.

Another thing that drove me pretty crazy was that every mission required the manual rebalancing of energy systems for each ship. Since shields don't regenerate by default, avoiding the loss of a fleet member pretty much demands that you rebalance your power use towards shields. Doing that for each ship, over and over again, was a bit of tedium that could have been done without.

The metagame also has problems. "Star Hammer" doesn't allow saves during a mission, which creates an all-or-nothing type of scenario that punishes mistakes, bad luck, and the sometimes vague win-conditions far too harshly. It also makes glitches very, very frustrating, especially when a long mission has been going on. More than once, I ran into a situation where the game never fully exited the realtime portion of a turn, and my only option was to restart. What finally soured me completely on the experience was almost finishing a long, difficult engagement...only to have my fleet suddenly refuse to fire at anything.

"Star Hammer" actually does a decent job with its setting, with your bridge being inhabited by real, identifiable characters who converse through text boxes. The humanization of the game is good in that sense, but the wider context tends to get lost. The "world" is actually a spiderweb of various organizations and people - and that's a cool idea - but the way it all comes across is as a confusing mash of names that don't end up meaning much.

I feel like "Star Hammer" might contain the seed of something that's really first-rate. It didn't clear the bar of recommendation for me, but doing so doesn't seem like it would be out of reach for the developers. The way the experience works as a whole needs quite a bit of polishing-up, though, before I would want to try it again.

Greetings fellow spaceship warfare enthusiast!


Starhammer: TVP as i will shorthand it, is a well designed space naval combat game.

I say naval because you do fight on a 2D plane with 3 "layers" pretending at "height" and "depth".

Your ships can move up and down but it does matter very little in th end as far as combat tactics go, its more useful to avoid colissions (oh yes, you can ram and be rammed). A clever tactician might abuse this by flying low or high all the time and using the dorsal or ventral shielding arcs as cheap shield batteries,. but you do not have that nugget from me, no sir you do not.

Combat itself plays out turn based, insofar you give your ships movement and firing orders and rebaance power levels to match the game situation then hit "play" and the "turn" will proceed in quite adorably cinematic manner, you can watch the shooting and enjoy, you will not be faced with twitch reaction requirements.


The combat does move in rahter similar routes once you have eased into "your" set of combat maneuvers and got comfortable with your tactics, and som consider it stale. I consider it the mark of a good tactician if the fight goes "uneventful" XD.


The story features likable characters (i will not spoil this for you) and a good, branching campaign that offers replayability.

Its got humor, action, spaceships and a good plot.


Graphics:

The graphics are good looking and will not crush a low end pc. Effects are well done and the sound design is very good: a big spaceship laser or gun SOUNDS as impressive as you would want to have it.

No pling pling here, no sir.


The game gets 4 stars out of 5, its a fun romp that does nothing wrong. While one might argue they could have done "more", it would be good to remembr that this game is well rounded and "works" as opposed to ambitioned projects that just turn into roadkill.

Read danny_maland's review (most helpful) to contrast with this. Similar points, he barely gave a thumbs down, I barely give a thumbs up.

TL;DR: Spacy. Combines elements for a story above its price. Gameplay gets more challenging and more complex as the game progresses. About 20 total ship types in game between two factions. Many bugs. No voiceovers. If they had more time or budget, this could have rivalled Homeworld.

Longer version, but I'll try to keep points short.

Story guy did his/her job (too lazy to look up credits). People have personalities. The world has politics. Everybody has a motive for their actions. Story in a game is important to me; this one shows a world.

Graphics did their job. Limited number of ships, but they look nice. Weapons are visible and are indicated when changing firing behavior. Worked well with story team: one station looks like a giant ship, fleet admiralty intended it that way.

Combat designers did their job. We-go/turned based system that plays out in real-time where you can review the previous turn with no loading delays. Movement indicators similar to recent XCOM games, they look nice. Turret firing arc indicators optional. Most turrets have the same range; damage and accuracy determine target priorities. Multi-mission chapters (can repair ships between missions, can only rearm ammo between chapters) is a sweet-sweet idea implemented well. Ships have a limited veterancy system, which benefits keeping ships alive. Requested reinforcements can show up mid-battle if they're small ships, which is nice to see happen. Qualms: can't target sentient mines (bigger than the smallest ship and very slow); no ship has overlapping turret arcs; targeted firing mode causes all turrets to hold fire unless firing on the target (contrast: autofire ships can hit as many targets as the ship has guns); sprayer acid clouds are numerous enough to blanket large amounts of the battlefield in late game missions; some missions give an escort objective, then order you to kill everything anyway (making it easier to ignore escort objectives); war score might be based mostly on ship energy distribution, making defensive scores a chore to obtain; enemies can sit still, while player ships cannot; nautalid(enemy) corpses can be so numerous that maneuver becomes unnecessarily difficult toward the end-game. Small points, but numerous. Would have preferred a few missions fighting alongside allies. That's personal preference though. Interface is a bit clunky/complex for some; I found it okay.

QA did not do their job. There are many bugs that are the make-or-break issues for many players. Final mission attempt 2 of 3: enemy monarch corpse drifted out of battlefield, enemies rallied at the corpse and made the fight very long, then 2 enemies left, killed one, the turn never ended, I had to restart. Clicking on crew skills button while a mission briefing is open will cause mission selection icons to disappear (solution: exit to main menu and resume, no loading time so it's superfast). Achievements are bugged; gone through the game twice and haven't gotten basic achievements for getting crew members. Ships will (as best I can tell) spontaneously hold fire, meaning they won't fire on enemies until you notice and change their fire orders. Acid spray area of effect may be much larger than the graphic; noticed ships with substantial space between them and the nearest stream still suffered ill effects.

The game's design allows for a lot of meta-game. You can dismiss corvettes with empty missile racks and request another corvette as reinforcement, and the corvette will show up mid-battle with full ammo. Reinforcements can also be used to go over the ship limit; dismiss the reinforcements before the next battle and request new ones to go over the limit in the next fight. Well-timed countermeasure launches can destroy up to 4 missiles, instead of just 1 (though this might be intentional); if well-placed, the countermeasures can also cause missile AOE to damage enemies. While a challenge, sprayer streams (temporarily degrade shields) and missiles can be baited and tricked with good raider maneuvers. Allied missiles can unfortunately hit allies; enemy missiles can be tricked into enemies. There are probably a lot of options I'm missing.

Personal idea: would have been nice for some mercenary work. Corporations pay for responding to distress beacons, personal rewards for securing a certain number of transports, recovering a certain amount of information, holding off an enemy for a certain amount of time, or destroying a certain number of enemies. Use that money to purchase a capital ship and pay for upgrades: armor, power core, engine and weapon tuning, more missile space, more powerful missiles, etc. The in-game greed factor would have helped longevity.

Unfortunately, the game's kind of dead. Steamspy says there is an average of 1 player at any given time. The last forum post was 6 weeks ago. Doubt there'd be any improvement, since there'd be almost no money to be made. [Edit: two weeks later and 0 ratings on the review. Sad because it's a game that at least deserves the attention.]

Despite the issues, the gameplay and story get the game a thumbs up.

The good:
- Simultaneous turn-based space combat! Was looking for this for a long time.
- Decent AI, with some tough scenarios (played on hard).
- Shield management is actually fun.

The bad:
- The ship variety is limited.
- Fourteen hours in and I never had the chance to customize my fleet. Every mission I have to use exactly what they give me. I never got any points to buy new ships.
- War Scale mechanics is opaque and seems pointless.
- Ammunition is unpredictable from mission to mission. Will I have 12 or 2 missiles this mission? Who knows!
- Crew RPG mechanics seems broken. Couldn't remove crew. Was given crew members I couldn't assign because there were no free slots. Because you can "respec" crew trees at any time, there is no sense of important decisions being made.
- Human ships are interesting, but I found the aliens to be boring (for whatever reason). Just not my thing, and they make up a majority of the battles.
- Screen gets really messy when the spitters start covering everything in their trails.
- No sense of drama during rescue/escort missions. Outcome is pre-determined, and no penalty for failing (you'll see).
- Dialog is boring. No voiceover.

Overall:
- Not recommended.

Hate the campaign. Fell in love with the skirmish mode. Took a ginormous fleet into battle, limped away an hour later with a single smoking frigate and a huge grin. Disappointed in the complete lack of customization options. Really Slitherine, I would have loved to tinker with the ship designs, or at least the weapon loadouts.

Star Hammer, Oh what a ride you gave me.

Some major points people bring up about this game is how clunky the game is to control and how weak the storyline and writing is. While I agree that the game is fairly clunky to start out with until you get familiar with the control scheme, the writing is anything but weak.

Let me explain. This game have a couple ways of playing it. Defensive, Neutral and Aggressive.
The genius of the writing is that you get out what you put into this game. A lot of games out there boast about how choices actually matter, but in this game that is truly the case. One of the rare games where it's true.
To explain why people find the game to be bland and boring, I have to first explain the Defensive/Aggressive system the game works under.
You can pick missions, they're either defensive, neutral or aggressive. The way you play inside the missions also dictate how much points to either direction you get, once you are swinging a bit too much to one side, the other side becomes unplayable. A huge majority of players, probably +90% played the game on the defensive scale and the reason for that is because playing the game like a sane person, protecting your ships, managing shields, using counter-measures to take out missiles, taking your time, protecting escort ships all give defensive score.
Stuff like RAMMING SPEED, putting all power to weapons when you're under heavy fire, rushing out of formation, lowering shields and not repairing your ships gives you aggressive score.
The better you are the more likely you are to get defensive score. And here is where the mixed genius and problem of that comes in.
The story you get when you play the defensive path is as basic as it gets. You follow orders, you do things by the book, you stay in the trenches with the others. And the story reflects that, you're not a hero. You're nothing but another soldier defending your home world from an alien invasion.

I played the game on the hardest difficulty and on the aggressive scale, I didn't care for the story either... Until a certain point when i realised that the game was reacting to the way i played and the fact that I didn't care at all for the story.
I noticed how the high command started getting frustrated with my actions, how I disobeyed orders and put not just my own fleet but the entire armada at risk. I also noticed how the further into the war I got and the more suicide missions I took, my crew got increasingly more frustrated, scared and worried. They started questioning my command, have emotional outbursts in combat, started fights between each other and towards the end, they even found strength and hope because they had survived this hell together. Real bonds were made, once they had to earn that you truly start to care for.
You're fighting an endless swarm of aliens, victory is impossible and you're deep behind enemy lines and yet the enemy has learned to fear your name. The story changes based on how you play the game. If you play it safe and defensive, you get told to defend star bases, escort civilian ships out of harms way. If you play the aggressive, you take the fight to an unstoppable force and do the impossible.

To be a hero, you have to act like a hero.
This game blew me away with how it reacted to my actions, the writers clearly had a story they wanted to tell but they allowed me to completely ignore it and pursue my own goals, and it let me.
If you can get past the clunky controls then this game can take you on a ride you won't soon forget, but you have to struggle for the game to recognise you and reward your efforts.
So to end my review of Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy
This is a game that doesn't hold your hand. It will mould itself around the way you play and gives you a unique experience based on that. I recommend this game with all my heart.

It's the Star Wars Armada Miniatures game on the PC and it's great.
I've played the first 3 missions and found it really interesting.
You can rebalance your shields, use special abilities (missiles so far), aimed fire or auto fire for your normal guns and there's firing arcs that you need to position the enemy in while trying to position yourself outside the enemies firing arcs as much as possible.
Turn based combat where the decisions are made and then the results are played out for a set period of real time. accidental collisions must be monitored and avoided and you can use the vertical axis to dodge as well.
With so many well implemented components this is a game to take your time learning and then enjoy playing AI skirmish matches afterwards. Only thing it seems to be missing is Multiplayer. If it had that it would be an absolute must buy game. As it is I still recommend it as a great implementation of strategic space ship combat.

Lacking in depth. There are only 8 ships and you cannot customize your characters or ship loadouts. You will never command more than 8 ships at a time, so if you are looking for large scale fleet command, this isn't for you. Combat is challenging and demands tactical foresight as there is no "rock paper scissors" system. Superior formation of your strike force (I wouldn't call it a fleet) and overall positioning is what gets you the win, so in that regard, the game has done a fantastic job fundamentally as a strategy game.

Enemy ship types do not vary too much so once you learn their abilities and targeting preferences you will quickly become bored if you dislike the idea of dfficulty stemming from larger enemy engagements and special situations like escorting a freighter or becoming surrounded within the first few turns of combat, rather than new enemy types.

I'd recommend it if you got it for $7.50 or less but full price does not deliver what your typical GOOD indie game does for the same price tag.

I wanted to like this game, but there's certain things missing from it which I can't forgive in a game like this.

All the weapons fire look the same, just with different colours. It can't be difficult to design a different shape salvo for different weapons. As it stands most battles look like a few ships with a rainbow crying in the middle of them.

There's a crap load of salvage missions, mostly escorting some frigate to a wreck through a series of waypoints that are entirely irrelevant because everything on the map moves to attack you from the very start, and when they're all dead the mission is complete, making them waypointless. However, you don't actually hear about anything that's been salvaged. You get no equipment or new tech or anything from it.

There's a variety of different hardpoints on ships with different weapons on them. Good. However, there's no upgrades or chance of anything new or different. What's on them is what's on them until the end. Providing variety for this is an obvious way to increase the tactical challenge (and fun) of the game.

Big capital ships have the same range as a half decent staple gun (basically the same as everything else).

The ships are not what I would call well designed. There's nothing distinctive about them. Stick a couple of engines on a rhombus and you'd have a better looking ship than half the fleet.

The story is too fragmented for most people to follow. I mean, you have to *really try* to immerse yourself in it; it doesn't entrap you in the world. Homeworld pulled you in within three missions; you watched your home be destroyed, and from that point you were onboard for wherever it'd take you. In this, a guy, who it's been made clear doesn't like you that much, dies, and you get to salvage his ship (well, sort of, see above). Oh and your father is someone high ranking. Not exactly mind blowing.

Do you like Battlefleet Gothic? How about any of the other tactical table top fleet games? Then you'll love this game. I've been waiting SO LONG for a tactical fleet game. There are a ton of 4x games (and they are cool) but I wish their combat was like Star Hammer.

Thank you so much Slitherine for making this game, I will be putting many hours into.