Battleships forever is a 2d top down space themed RTS with a unique art style and an emphasis on things exploding. In it, you command a fleet of ships to deal with the ever-present threat of raiders and rapidly make your way through the ranks. That is, up until mysterious ships start attacking people, and you are forces to join with the raiders to try to wipe everyone out. This is told through a series of campaign missions

Visually, it"s quite a distinctive game. The ships themselves are reasonably distinguishable and a lot of thought has gone into giving ships careful balancing, with a lot of care paid to the design. The bullets themselves are probably the most visually impressive part of the game, with lasers, rockets, bullets, and even independent firing stations getting a share of the action. The screen can at times become exceptionally noisy, especially if you"re looking at a ship as it explodes. It"s all pretty exciting, and it looks very, very good at higher graphics levels. A warning, though, at higher graphics levels, the game tends to be exceptionally processor heavy.

In terms of sound, the game is... sufficient. The music tends more towards the annoying and laser fire tends to get spammed so much that the sound will imprint itself onto your brain. You won't be missing much if you turn it off.

The story isn't strong. The game constantly tries to remind you of what you're doing and why it's so important and tends to force actions on the player. At one point (early on, no spoilers) your high command tells you to leave a poor defenseless mining outpost to the raiders and get out. Fair enough, I thought, and tried to leave. Unfortunately, the game didn't want any of that and, instead, made me hang around and try to take out the raiders, at which point the commander you're supposed to look up to appears and

effortlessly takes them out.

This is in stark contrast to the missions themselves. The mission where you have to fight off a few raiders, and then everything just gets worse and worse is absolutely amazing, and a real joy to play. Most of them are well made and interesting to play, and although they don't deviate much from "Wait around here, when the guys that aren't you show up, shoot them!", the game does a good job of hiding that from the player.

The game really, really wants you to think tactically and fight your enemies with skill, but it tends to descend into the usual mass attack on each individual enemy. Targeting individual parts of each ship theoretically makes things easier, but weapon spread tends to make it pointless at anything but point blank range. Adding to the masses of pointless complication is the fact that you've got to manually reconfigure your shields, which can create a (strangely ineffective) shield in any shape you want around your ship, or make any part of your ship invincible. This does make it possible to ignore a lot of the damage, but it's too fiddly, and it's far too easy to mis-click and lose a ship piece because of it. Having the shields immediately route to the section taking the highest amount of damage would be substantially easier and a hell of a lot less irritating.

I can't end without mentioning the wonderful ship creating system, which gives the game a lot more replayability. However, it's very difficult to create a ship that looks anywhere near as good as the pre-made ones, or that doesn't look like it should crumple under the recoil of its guns. On the plus side, you can make ships out of guns, which is something every game ought to have.

All up, it's quite a good game. The visual style is quite distinctive and, on higher level systems, it looks exceptional. The story's not much but the missions are and the ship creation system is fun but difficult. Definitely worth a download, just mute it when you start.

PS: If this game was multiplayer it would be amazing. The fact that it isn't is a crime against humanity.