I recently played a closed beta of Steambirds Alliance, an online free-to-play shooter coming soon to Steam. It plays a lot like a twin-stick shooter with an isometric camera angle. It also features account-level and run-based progression, making it a bit of a rogue-lite as well. The combat is snappy with a variety of chassis to unlock, and there’s also a funny little story set-up about a war between birds and cats. However, I do have some concerns about the progression system and the game’s performance that will hopefully get addressed before launch.
The gameplay in Steambrirds Alliance is simple, but satisfying. Each chassis has a slightly different play-style, but classifying it as a twin-stick shooter seems apt. The starting chassis is as traditional as it gets, with one stick moving your ship around and the other aiming your gun and shooting. The second chassis I unlocked was slightly different, looking a lot like a Gundum with a large sword. This weapon works differently in that you charge up the sword in a particular direction and anything that passes through it takes massive, sustained damage. They both offer a solid and varied experience with the starter chassis being familiar to those who may have played Geometry Wars or similar games. The sword chassis, however, gets extremely powerful as it levels up, which is good because it starts out very fragile.
The upgrade tree is also fairly robust, offering some skills unique to each chassis, but also many that are universal. Basic things like more armor and faster weapon reloads are available, but there are also skills that improve each chassis’ special ability. The sword chassis has a great special alt that creates a healing ring allowing you to take a huge amount of damage for a short amount of time. As you level up the chassis it turns into powerhouse, laying waste to dozens of enemies in no time.
I did run into a few progression issues, however. While you keep a general account level, each time you die your chassis starts over at level 1. This means that you need to grind levels in order to take on some of the more difficult missions. If one mission keeps kicking your butt, it can be tedious to keep banging your head against it. There doesn’t seem to be much you can do in order to alleviate this.
The other issue was performance. As soon as the game connects with other players in a public zone the game’s performance drops dramatically. During the tutorial section I had wonderfully smooth performance, as the game’s visual are not that demanding and I was running it on a very capable PC. However, once in a mission where other players could join, the framerate dropped. This wasn’t a graphical issue as I went through all the graphics options to hopefully fix it. I just believe there is a lot of lag added to the session when you are connected online. Being a beta, hopefully this can be rectified before launch, but it does impact the gameplay. As the levels get more difficult and more enemies get thrown at you, latency and lag can significantly impair your ability to handle many combat scenarios.
It has to be re-stated that this was a closed beta I played, so hopefully not representative of the final product. It should also be noted that Steambirds Alliance will be free-to-play, monetized through what appears to be cosmetic-only microtransaction. That said, what is here right now is a little rough around the edges. If the performance issues can be ironed out and the progression system tweaked to limit the amount of grinding out of the gate, there’s fun here to be had. I could see Steambirds Alliance being a great casual shooter to chill out with and play with your friends. There’s also some depth, allowing more committed players a lot of skills and items to unlock and a stiff challenge if they seek it out.
Steambirds Alliance will be going into open beta very soon, so everyone will have a chance to check it out for themselves.
