When the next generation of consoles came out I thought, great now we can engage in some great space combat, something which only really worked well on the PC, alas, so far, it was not to be, so we have to turn back to the PC to see what a space combat game should be.

GoD Factory: Wingman may be the worse titled game for some time, but what it lacks for in an aesthetically pleasing title, it makes up for in game play. The game originally was a failed Kickstarter project, which found a home and much needed cash with Bandai Namco.

You can ignore the back story as the aim of the game is to fly around blowing the bejesus out of the opposition in one of your two space fighters; yup you get two. There is no single player game as such, although the tutorials contain no other players; rather the game is designed to pit two teams of four fighters against each other. The game has four racers which you can ally yourself to, each with their own unique strengths and weaknesses.

Starting with the control interface you can play with either a joystick, gamepad or a combination of mouse and keyboard. Although all of these options work well and the game is very responsive, overall the gamepad is the preferred option. The joystick had no discernable advantage over the keyboard and although working with the mouse was fine the keyboard control of sideslipping seemed to have a minimum distance, so didn’t respond as well as the gamepad. A remapped Xbox 360 controller should work fine; my cheapo GAME gamepad was recognised and seemed to work with no obvious problems.

Once you fire up the game you have access to a number of options, although if you’re thinking of upgrading your ship, it’s worthwhile going through the tutorials as you get a various number of credits.

The visuals on this arcade space fighter game are sumptuous; with good design shown in both the environment and the ships you fly and fight against. Against this backdrop your aim is to protect your carrier, whilst at the same time inflicting damage on the opposing team. With the controls being easy to learn and use, you’ll spend lots of time fighting and not searching the keyboard for esoteric manoeuvring buttons. That is not to say that should you wish it that the game does not have a number of clever bells and whistles, but for the most part, in the beginning, these are not needed and you’ll soon pick up the ones you find useful.

In matches you have free reign for you and your friends to come up with an appropriate strategy, but you have to take into account that this is all against a clock as the two opposing carriers continue to hammer against each other until one is destroyed. So, you can take off after the opposing team’s fighters first, or concentrate you fire power on the opposing carrier or try and take up a defensive position first, the game does not tie you down to any specific strategy. Either way the combat is going to be an adrenaline fuelled experience.

Survive and even triumph in the game and you will be rewarded with experience and, more importantly, cash. This is the cash you will use to customise your ship, with bigger and better weapons, better engines; the list of alternatives is quite vast.

At the present time the game does have a small and hopefully transient problem, that of not having enough players to actually set up a match, it can take some time to find other players, you can add bots, but it’s really not the same. So, it’s a great game which, so far, lacks a big enough player base.

8

Charles Packer