Vector Thrust

Written by Dave Gamble on 10/8/2014 for PC  

Life is complicated. Sure, ultra-modern technology is supposed to make things easier, but have you ever stood at a grocery store self-checkout wondering what variety of apple you’re trying to buy? Sometimes…. sometimes you just want something to be simple. Take, for example, modern flight sims. I have an A-10 Warthog simulator that is so realistically complex that it takes me 20 minutes to get the engines started, and that’s if I have done it recently enough to remember how. That’s great for when I’m in a Walter Mitty mood, but sometimes I want to just be able to sit down and play while waiting for the water to come to a boil while making dinner. Which brings us to an arcade-style air combat shooter called Vector Thrust.

Vector Thrust, developed by an Indie known as TimeSymmetry and published by Iceberg Interactive, “Vector Thrust is a fast-paced action-arcade combat flight simulator, with a unique cel shaded art style for PC.” The game is available as an early access on Steam, so while we were able to take an early look at it for this preview, it is not yet feature complete. That having been said, it is far enough along to get an idea as to where they are headed with it.

It is also at a stage where the comparisons with Ace Combat, the venerable PlayStation series of air combat games, will be inevitable. These comparisons will certainly have merit. The salient features of relaxed flight physics, ultra-simplified controls for both flight and weapons management, and the relatively close-in fighting with swarms of enemy combatants all appear to be baked into the batter.

Visually, however, there is a stark difference between the cel shaded rendering of the aircraft and the more realistic style of Ace. As I was flying in first-person cockpit mode, that didn’t make a great deal of difference - the very hallmark of modern air combat is the distances at which even relatively close skirmishes occur. Typically, the most detail you actually see of an opponent is a square HUD tracking box around a small dot, with the exceptions being nose-to-nose passes, which happen in something less than the blink of an eye, and when trailing large, slow mega-bombers.

The gameplay as it stands today allows for keyboard, joystick, and game controller options. I went with the game controller, which I consider to be superior to the other options when it comes to the rapid responses required in an arcade environment, as opposed to the control and finesse required in a more realistic simulation. The controls are very straightforward, although the default setup’s use of the A and B buttons, as opposed to the triggers, as weapon firing controls took awhile for me to get used to. There are configuration screens provided to change things such as this, of course, along with the rest of the expected adjustments for graphics, audio, game difficulty, etc.

As mentioned, this is really a “sit down and start playing” kind of game, so it wasn’t long before I was mixing it up with a handful of enemy planes flown by more or less capable AI pilots. At the default difficulty setting, it was fairly easy to survive against superior numbers via the tactic of continually turning at the highest G’s the plane would give me. With a simplified flight physics model, I had no worries over bleeding off energy in an extended high G turn, so it was merely a question of adjusting speed and angles to eventually get inside an enemy’s turn. From that position, the guided missiles were very effective. Now and then I would get close enough to the opponent to score a gun kill too.

While it is apparently not yet available in the early access version (the button was grayed out), there are menu items for multiplayer combat. One can assume that this will take the traditional form of most multiplayer games in that there will be both co-op and adversarial options. With the learning curve being essentially non-existent what with the relaxed physics and easy controls, this might be a good game for online dogfighting with friends that would not normally be willing to forgo their M-16 and ground-based tactics in favor of a cleaner fight in the battleground in the sky.  Time will tell.

While there is clearly quite a bit of work remaining, even the early access version provides an engaging arcade experience, and at the current price of $14.99 on Steam it is already worth the price of admission. The ability to choose between just sitting down and playing to kill a few minutes, or spending more time building up your hangar of airplanes ala the “World Of [Tanks/Planes/Ships]” titles and working through campaigns, provides a nice flexibility for tailoring the experience to your current situation. Although I only glanced at it, there is also a mission editor for those who like to roll their own. Depending on how custom missions can be shared with others, this feature points to tons of future growth opportunity.