I previously talked about Captain Forever during its pre-launch phase, when you had to pay $20 to access it. The game is now available for free, here.

And I'm still horrendous at it.

Captain Forever is what you might get if you crossed Banjo/Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts with Space Invaders. You build your own ship in realtime by scavenging the parts of enemy vessels and adding them to your own, until you find a baddie with nicer thrusters or shields or blasters, at which point you defeat them in battle and harvest their parts, and so on and so forth until you die.

That's the idea, anyway. Unless I get tremendously lucky and the game spawns a ship made up of nothing but awesome guns and no engines, I still find myself completely unable to build a ship of any strength -- by the time the Echo-level bad guys show up, I'm pretty much screwed. I'm not entirely sure how much of this is my fault, and how much of it is the game's design, but smarter people seem to be having a lot of fun with it.

Either way, the damn thing is free -- not like you've got much to lose. Should you decide to donate $20, however, you'll gain access to Captain Successor, the sequel to Forever which includes a bunch of new weapons and ship types.

Which I also suck at.

Legacy Comments (will be imported soon)

Chris Carter

"Captain Forever is what you might get if you crossed Banjo/Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts"

Gummi Ships did it first! (Kingdom Hearts)

WormFOODx

I just tried this game and its not bad!

CthulhuFtaghn

Isn't this the whole point of Blast Works and Tumiki Fighters? What makes this different from those two?

Forcepath

That was interesting and almost made me miss class.

I now know that I suck at building ships too. Thanks Anthony.

Gantz

Anthony, you can use the X key as a kind of save-state feature.
If you're having that much trouble, I suggest you use it after each re-build.

It basically takes your current ship and saves it as a massive URL.

Gantz

@CthulhuFtaghn
In this game you BUILD your fighter out of other ships parts, not clump them together mindlessly.

As you're flying around shooting things, you grab pieces with the mouse and essentially places them around your pod/ship magnetically and they all have different properties.

Example: If you place too many thrusters or even a thruster with more power than the rest on one side of your ship, you'll have trouble going straight and in some cases simply spin in circles. The placement of everything is very important, such as putting thrusters facing the opposite direction so you can actually reverse with speed greater than that of a turtle. Or simply add guns to different directions for more attack opportunities.

Insane Enigma

If you think you are bad at it now Anthony, wait until you hit the six star level and see the ships they send at you then. It will make you stop playing for a long time.

Ignominus

Thanks for the heads up. I'm liking it enough to suck at it and still have fun.

Things get a lot harder real fast though...

DinnertimeNinja

I feel like it would be infinitely better without a wasd control scheme.

Rockvillian

Those white ships are mean.

Mecha Six VII

this game is HARD

and the white ships are PUREST EVIL

Super Mega Hyper

Dude I was so happy when I managed to grab hold of a crappy little white girder and a laser, too bad I got my ass blown apart about 5 seconds after.

this game is really good.

16bitmonster

this was fun. i realize bout 20 minutes into it that i was breaking the law i guess.. lawl serves me right for not reading.. a giant purple ship came and murder my face. :/

also, reminds me of escape velocity.. that game was oh so deep and lovely.

Zero_armada

Game's fun, but I really wish I had time to actually build up the ship before some asshat AI ship swoops in and starts shooting.

Super Mega Hyper

@Zero_armada: I completely agree.