TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Captain Forever

Fshhhhhhh.

Boop boop boop boop boop!

Pkow!

This is Captain Forever, a free web game where you shoot ships, and bolt bits of the debris onto your own. I was put off it before because when people were pimping it, you had to pay to get in on the beta. The other ways Captain Forever tries to persuade you not to play it is by making the game’s site confusing and devoid of information about the game, and releasing a similarly named sequel almost immediately, which isn’t free. It needn’t be so hard, just click this link to play secretly free now forever my lord.

I’ve been playing it secretly free now forever my Lord all day – my new year’s resolution was to design more space ships, so the year is shaping up well already. If you’d crashed your time machine into my Lego space police set when I was a kid and told me that in the year 2010, I’d be able to snap together my own little craft then fly them around and blow bits off other spaceships to make my spaceship bigger, I’d have been all, “What use is that information realistically of to me at this stage?” But it’s cool.

Since space is dangerous and there’s no separate screen for ship design, you don’t always have time to optimally rebuild your ship after a fight to incorporate all the cool new parts you’ve salvaged. Thus, you scoot wonkily away from the fight with a hastily cobbled space hulk like this:

And find a quiet corner of the galaxy to take yourself apart and build something a little more like this:

My logic with that design was to protect my parts: obviously it’s counter-productive to cover your guns entirely, but by giving them ‘barrels’ like that most incoming fire would hit the tough, functionless hull pieces instead of my fragile weapons and engines.

The same logic applies when attacking: you’re trying to destroy their core piece without damaging too much of the rest of them, because anything they have left when they die simply falls off for the taking. It’s glorious when a lucky shot nails their core module and a whole vast battleship made of tier-5 parts just gently disintegrates into a nebula of fatal freebies.

This one… is harder to explain. I made this after buying Captain Successor, esentially the registered version, and as you can see it adds some stuff. The quivering pink lozenges are Blurst Shields: they bounce back enemy fire. The U-shaped piece is a Chrono engine, which accelerates the operating speed of anything attached to it. The circles are all translocators, a weird direction-agnostic propulsion device that lets you strafe and reverse as fast as you move forwards, but is useless for turning sharply. And the big circle is just a bubble shield: it gets taken down easily, but regenerates, meaning small clashes do no lasting damage.

This is the fastest ship I’ve built so far, structured to allow two racks of India-class engines to max out propulsion without making me dangerously wide. When most of it got smashed to bits by a Kilo craft, I downsized to this:

Slight, but my most powerful ship – and also my most musical. It’s the only time I’ve lasted long enough to scavenge some Prismatic Juliets (white guns), the second best in the game, and I’ve backed them up with a chorus of India and Hotel lasers – the next two tiers down. This is significant a) because a laser hotel would be awesome, and b) because your fire in Captain Forever doesn’t sound the same with every shot: the tones progress through a musical sequence, so your selection of guns and their different fire rates combine to make every ship play a different tune. The three-layered rhythm of this one is awesome – if you do get Captain Successor, try it out here.

At the end of a game, you can go back through every form your ship ever took during it, and save any as a link anyone can click and play with. It’s one of the neatest content sharing systems I’ve seen in a game, better in some ways than Spore’s. Most people will only be playing with the free version of course, so here‘s the one design I did save while playing that – the gun barrels one. Slow, but safe.

If you get Successor, which is $20, my others are here, here, here, here, here and here.