When you play a space combat game you're generally in charge of piloting a little fighter. You fly around engaging in dogfights with other fighters and try to avoid the powerful capital ships, the ones that can take you down with a shot or two. Sometimes you might even be fighting around and underneath them, zipping around like pesky flies while trying not to crash into them or draw their attention.
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Dreadnought offers you no such nonsense. Here you play those capital ships themselves, massive machines that fill the sky. See those dozens of turrets on the sides? They each individually turn and fire. See that shadow you cast on the land below? That’s because you’re a giant, something to be feared.
Dreadnought is the latest title from Spec Ops developers Yager and is about as far away from their famously story-driven experience as you can get. This is a free-to-play multiplayer game first and foremost, although project manager Mark Liebold promises a robust, episodic single-player campaign. “It is a Yager game, after all,” he said with a smile.
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But unlike Spec Ops, whose masterful storyline didn’t mesh with its shoehorned multiplayer mode, this almost seems the opposite. Giant ships pounding each other with missiles works beautifully for multiplayer thrills, horrors of war be damned.
It helps that the controls are simple, regardless of the crazy technology you’re pushing around. The level we demoed took place in Earth’s atmosphere, although there are battles in space, and you easily raised and lowered altitude and moved around using standard WASD controls. You can choose to put more power in different areas like shields and engines to temporarily strengthen them in times of need, but otherwise moving around and shooting other ships is fairly simple.
While each ship is a massive behemoth some are still bigger than others, and there are five different classes available to fit your playstyle. The most basic is the Destroyer, which is an all-around average ship. There's the Artillery Cruiser, which is basically a long gun that lets you act as a sniper, there are Corvettes which are fast and zippy and can warp into and out of combat, and also Tactical Cruisers, which are support units. Then there are the dreadnoughts, slow-moving lumbering monstrosities that come loaded with nukes and all sorts of powerful weaponry.
Dreadnoughts are really fun to play as but they take forever to move. You generally don't need to get many hits on an enemy to destroy it though- they come absolutely loaded for war. They even have nukes, which can almost take down a ship by themselves- some classes do have countermeasures to stop them, however. The Dreadnoguhts we played with had warp drives that let them disappear and reappear a little bit in the distance, which is effective at utterly terrifying your foes when you suddenly appear in the middle of a fray.
The Corvette class offers the smallest ship by far and can’t take many hits but it’s so fast that it generally doesn’t have to. It’s perfect for sneak and run hits, since it can get right into the fray and zoom out before anyone even knows it was there. A warp drive is pretty essential for this class.
The Artillery class really is a sniper. You’ll see the ship's beams streaking across the map nearly from the start of the match, since they’re the only weapons that can hit you from far away. It’s very hard to turn them around and change their aim, however, so it can be fairly useless in a close-up fight.
Tactical Cruisers are best for experts and thus were controlled by the developers on our side of the five on five battle. They offer a variety of buffs to help your teammates up and while it's a smaller ship it's still got some effective weapons on it.
All of this looks utterly fantastic thanks to the power of the Unreal Engine 4, which lets the ships look incredibly detailed while also blowing up in glorious fashion.
Perhaps the best praise we can give the game is that the group of journalists I was playing with unanimously decided to keep playing after the first match. Even with a couple of rounds under our belts it still felt like we were only scratching the surface here- there were many more ship classes and abilities to try out.
Like every other game being released free-to-play Yager is promising that you won’t be able to buy your way to victory, but they weren’t able to offer details on just what the in-game store will be stocked with. In the final version you'll be able to customize your ships completely, choosing loadouts and even the look of the ship in order to make it your own. From everything we've seen this looks to be one of the good ones.
Dreadnought will be hitting sometime in 2015 from Grey Box Studios, with an open beta offering everyone a chance to try it out. For more on it check out playdreadnought.com.
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