Bang! Gunship Elite Preview

Since it was founded in 1996, Red Storm Entertainment has built its reputation on highly realistic covert-ops games - such as Rainbow Six and Rogue Spear. The company has since expanded the scope of its games with releases like Force 21, a real-time strategy game focusing on a possible war between China and the US set in the immediate future, and more recently Shadow Watch, a stylized turn-based strategy game with visual elements borrowed from Warner Brothers' Batman and Superman animated television shows. Red Storm's latest release will be the company's furthest departure from the norm yet. It's called Bang! Gunship Elite, a space shooter which is unlike any game released in the genre in recent memory.

Bang! Gunship Elite is actually not Red Storm's first space-based game. The developer-publisher had been working on a capitol-ship simulator earlier this year called UFS Vanguard. The game looked nearly complete when Red Storm demonstrated it to us a few months ago. However, for reasons not yet made public, UFS was suddenly cancelled, and the team was disbanded and sent to work on other projects, making Bang! Red Storm's first entry into the space race. The game was on display for the first time at Red Storm's booth during E3, where we spoke with one of the game's designers and played through a number of its single and multiplayer levels.

Currently in development at France-based RayLand Interactive, Bang! Gunship Elite initially resembles standard space-combat simulators like StarLancer and FreeSpace 2, but it plays more like a mix between Descent and old console side scrollers like Gradius and R-Type. The game lacks any claustrophobic enclosed spaces, though, and takes place entirely in the vast expanse of space. Unlike the traditional games in the genre, Bang! casts aside any notion of strategy or piloting skill and doesn't fiddle with anything other than all-out action. That's not to say that the game only requires an itchy trigger finger from its players, however. Even though Bang! looks like it plays on rails, the game is indeed completely open, and players will have to couple quick shooting with some fancy flying to get through the game's waves of enemies.

Gameplay

Because of its focus on action, the enemies in Bang! can typically be destroyed by no more than a handful of shots. To counter this seemingly easy level of difficulty, Bang! throws large amounts of enemy aircraft at you in any given mission. These ships will come at you in groups of three to five in various formations. It will take you no more than a few seconds to dispatch one of these enemy waves. As soon as one is destroyed, though, another wave will be right behind, attempting to stop you from completing your goals. These waves are made up of three different enemy factions in Bang!, all of which are alien. While only two, the Sektar and the Morgoths, were shown at the E3 demonstration, Red Storm says that all three will behave differently in combat. Red Storm European development manager Adrian Curry explains: "They do differ in not only ship appearance, speed, and armory, but also their battle tactics. The Sektar are generally considered space pirates and as such use more hit-and-run tactics and use the asteroids as cover, whereas the Morgoths are a warlike race and are very aggressive in combat."

The single-player campaign in Bang! is made up of 19 levels and is completely linear, meaning that the you won't be allowed to move on to the next mission without successfully completing the current one. The levels are displayed on a map that visually tracks your progress from mission to mission, and each level has a set of time-critical objectives that need to be carried out. In the first level, for example, you're put in charge of protecting the Dagon Optimus, a freight ship that comes under fire from enemy forces. In this mission, a boarding ship will dock with the Optimus and attempt to steal sensitive data from its mainframe. You'll have to fend off the hoards of enemy fighters attacking both you and the freighter until a special weapon becomes available to you, which does so only after a set amount of time has expired. The boarding ship's shields can only be penetrated by this weapon, so you'll have to ensure that you and the freighter remain alive long enough to drive the attackers away.

Subsequent missions include other standard space-combat gameplay like escorting vulnerable ships and taking on large capital cruisers. The constant in all these levels is that all of them focus on the abilities of your ship's weapons. Like the aforementioned side-scrollers this game borrows elements from, Bang! focuses heavily on over-the-top weapons that become more extravagant in their visual impact as you progress through the game. There are ten such weapons that will be available to you, all of which are gained within a certain level and not in between missions, as is standard in other space shooters. What follows on the next page is a brief rundown of all ten weapons in Bang! in the order they become available.

Weapons

Ion blaster: This is the default weapon on your ship, and while its dual vulcan cannons are the weakest in the arsenal, its ammunition is unlimited.

Flux beam: The flux beam is actually a set of two blue-crystal cannons that rotate around your ship. This weapon is faster and more powerful than the ion blaster, and it locks on to its targets quicker. However, ammunition for the flux beam is hard to come by, so you'll have to use this weapon sparingly.

Phase shift cannon: Three needle-like barrels form a triangle around the sides of your ship and dispense ammo at an extremely high rate of fire, making the phase shift cannon deadly against larger ships.

Hellfire: The hellfire fires a pair of slow-moving balls of energy in tandem at a slow rate of fire. While it's not very efficient against the faster fighter ships, the hellfire is very effective against static targets. This weapon can also be charged up for a more damaging splash effect.

Titans hammer: Even though this weapon has a slow rate of fire, its beams of energy travel extremely fast. When it hits a target, the titans hammer causes an anime-like bright streak to flash across the horizon, followed by elliptical burst of energy.

Magma cannon: The magma cannon has two giant hook-like appendages that come together to form a single blue sphere of fast-moving energy that creates a massive explosion and splash. The energy's destructive power varies according to the distance of the object from the center of the explosion, and it is very effective for taking out waves of enemy fighters at once.

Electronic laser: This high-level weapon fires rings of blue and red energy one by one at a very rapid pace. Each hits for a significant amount of damage, and is very efficient in close combat because there are no shock waves to produce splash damage.

Statis cannon: The statis cannon is slower than the electronic laser but more powerful. Its tracking mechanism requires that you keep your target centered in your ship's reticle at all times, however, and can't be used like the other "fire and forget" weapons.

Sonic cannon: This weapon is a cannon mounted on the right-hand side of your ship and fires a single shot with a long, twisty trail that will prove absolutely deadly against larger ships.

Plasma cannon: The plasma cannon is the final weapon you'll come across in Bang! and is easily the most powerful. Its fast-moving, streaking orange beams of energy cause cataclysmic explosions that extend the length of the screen, in effect acting like a nuclear bomb.

The graphics are easily the most noticeable and marketable aspect of Bang! Gunship Elite. The game uses gorgeous and extremely detailed bitmaps to tile the 3D space of each level. Even though the game takes place entirely in space, vibrant nebulas, gigantic planets, and colorful bodies of gas stand in sharp contrast to the pitch black expanses of outer space that are commonly associated with games in this genre. The backgrounds, ship models, and weapon effects look so good, in fact, that many in Red Storm's booth initially thought the game was a "rail-shooter," a visually appealing game that can afford to boast a high detail of graphics because it limits player movement to onscreen aiming. The game's multiplayer component also promises to be impressive. Currently, Bang! has eight deathmatch maps that can support up to eight players over either a LAN or Internet connection. These maps aren't just empty regions of space, either. They include plenty of asteroids (some of which are the size of capital ships) and space stations for players to dogfight through and around, and are littered with some or all of the weapons available in the single player campaign as well as the standard fare of items like shields and health.

Bang! Gunship Elite is in its final stages of development, and is scheduled for an early summer 2000 release. RayLand is concurrently developing a Dreamcast version of the game for release sometime this fall. The developers are looking into making both PC and Dreamcast versions compatible for play with each other over the Internet, although RayLand and Sega are still researching whether such an endeavor would be practical. In the immediate future, Red Storm is expected to release a demo of the PC version of Bang! which will be available for download free over the Internet sometime in the following weeks.