March to war month: The Last Federation

Some games are easy to introduce and discuss, and others are difficult. But Arcen, makers of Last Federation, is generally a well-spring of being difficult to discuss in and of themselves, and then their games take it to the next level. Admittedly the last Arcen game I reviewed was Starward Rogue, which was a very different game.

The Last Federation is a very, very strange game to talk about. It bends a lot of what you'd expect from the genre around trying to set up this one, rather perfect little scenario that the game takes place in. But I guess I should explain the genre before I go anywhere else. TLF is a space simulation game, likely to be compared to the lineage of Master of Orion. However, if MoO and its variety of descendant games are described as "4x" games (or x4, I can never remember) then TFL is more like an 2.5x game. Most of the elements are there, but not all of them.

For one thing, the basic story is you're the last Hydral, the first race to gain space travel in a planetary system with almost ten different races. And your race was wiped out, as they were cruel dictators of the system until that wiping out. It isn't well explained why a space-faring race would be wiped out as such, but hey, it worked for Dragonball Z!

As the Last Hydral, you don't really have an empire per se and you don't really have anything approaching imperial resources. Oddly enough, though, the elements you'd expect to be dropped from a 4x given those restraints aren't the ones TFL is missing.

A slice of Indie: Morphblade

I really liked Gunpoint. My understanding, from reading the news around Gunpoint, was the next game by its developer was Heat Signature, which is this amazing sounding game about ... Actually go google it, but basically it's about being a little tiny space pod that slowly captures larger and larger ships, then battles with those ships, can lose those ships and so forth. I haven't read too much about it since it's like reading about Axiom Verge 2 or Double Dragon Neon 2: They will probably happen, but it is very far away from now in time and I don't want to think about being in my forties.

Regardless, apparently the developer of Gunpoint put out another game, on the third. I learned this when I was browsing through news of the Humble Bundle Monthly, which means not only did the game come out without me knowing but also entered a position of me owning it without knowing I was owning it beforehand. Which is pretty nice.