
This is certainly a functional approach to the strategy genre, but it’s not a very exciting one. Meanwhile, the enemy is trying to capture the same points thereby turning the entire experience is something of an elaborate tug of war match. These points grant you money which in turn allow you to build more spaceships. At its core, Istrolid is a game about capturing points. function.Īs for the strategy elements, this is where things go off the rails a bit. Best of all, the game does a fantastic job of making sure that component placement does indeed affect the abilities of a ship as much as its visuals, so there really is quite a bit to explore regarding form vs. It successfully captures the simple joy of building within a video game and eventually does offer the most creative minds enough components to build some truly fantastic creations. However, if you so happen to enjoy this particularly style of DIY game design, then it’s hard to imagine you won’t fall in love with this element of Istrolid. Commands like “Weapons must be placed on a mount” are made all the more difficult to understand due to the fact that Istrolid doesn’t tell you which piece the mount is, while later builds that present you with hundreds of available pieces require a strict understanding of the underlying systems that govern which ships are deemed to be spaceworthy. It’s clearly trying to be a bit obscure in how its mechanics actually work, meaning that even the early parts of the game that just let you design simple spaceships are going to take some time for new players to understand. As a crafting game that allows you to design spaceships, Istrolid is rather interesting. It’s here that things aren’t quite so free and clear. While this quality alone does earn Istrolid a moment of applause, the question then becomes whether or not the game’s content is worth investing your time in rather than your money. You will not find a single microtransaction or donation option anywhere as, for the time being, every piece of content that developer treeform made for Istrolid is available to all Steam users at absolutely no cost.

It’s one part crafting game that asks you to build a fleet of unique space ships with available parts, and one part real-time strategy title that has you maneuvering said space ships into battle in order to gain resources, capture points and, naturally, defeat those who oppose you.Īt the risk of insulting Istrolid, I must say that the game’s best quality is the fact that it is indeed truly free. Istrolid is one of many free-to-play games that get released on a weekly basis via Steam, but it is already generating buzz in the indie game community as one of those true free-to-play games that indeed could have been a satisfying retail release in another era.
