Blipzkrieg

This was *lots* of fun! Love the concept...

I disagree about the difficulty level mentioned in the review - I found it relatively easy-going and was never stuck on a level (bar a couple of false starts). The final stage took me less than 7 minutes and that was the longest.

5/5

Is "Blipzkrieg" a pun on the German word "Blitzkrieg"? It translates to "lightning war" or something.
That would be a strategy that the Germans used in WWI, for all you uneddicated folk.

Vary nice game - love the art style and level design. Now, if only I weren't stuck on level 28...

Blitzkrieg was used in World War II, not World War I. World War I's warfare tended to be bogged down in place for months or years, both sides gaining and losing land without much change in territory... Blitzkrieg was intended to be the opposite, shattering your opponent's side with concentrated forces very swiftly.

Am I the only one who finds the click and drag system infuriating? I like this game quite a bit, but it would be ten times better if the commander just followed my mouse when I held down click or a similar mechanic. I tend to run my pathway into walls by accident, then when correcting find I've ordered a backtrack into turret territory and have to draw the whole thing over again.

Excellent little game.

I am also stuck on lvl 28, the difficulty seems to be way higher than the rest, or maybe my tactis are just flawed.

When the two upper right power sources are left, when i get one, i cant get to the other before the computer spawns random patrols, and take the first one back.

Halfway through and LOVING it. Generally I hate those games where you send out troops, capture a base and win the level.

But this game is a bright future for me. It uses SOME of that gameplay idea, but adds more stuff to it and overall makes this a wonderful game. Simple enough, nice graphics, its fun. Truly a joy to play.

@Skjalldyr
I've got the same problem. My soldiers just aren't fast enough to get to both of them. Does anyone have some advice how to beat level 28.

Quite an interesting game. It's interesting that the name of the game is quite literally the name of the game up until level 28 and then it's more about strategy/luck than just running headstrong into a pile of enemies.

For those with issues on 28

They don't tell you this but you can "order" your units and turrets by rapidly clicking nearby. This is really helpful when you're trying to keep your turrets from looking the other way when the cubes are attacking.

Regarding level 28:

Level 29 was the one that really took me a while to figure out.

Blipzkrieg, you had me at "Your battle suit is ready."

Really, it was then that I started liking this game. There's something that just works so well about very basic, essential writing. It just works. The first few levels give a little bit of narration that for some reason is just perfect under the circumstances.

This is really a fun game to play. The music sounds a lot like Metroid's to me. Strangely, Blipzkrieg on the whole has a Total Annihilation feel to it, and there are several reasons. Like in TA, you start out nearly alone. You apparently wear a battle suit like in TA, which has a Commander unit with some powerful weapons and very high HP, just like in this game. Your job is to continuously make your way from one portal to the next, until you reach your final destination and eliminate the enemy base. You do so by gradually gathering together a sufficiently large force and defeating the enemy forces as necessary. Orders can be given ahead of time, allowing you to basically queue up actions and perform a long sequence of moves. Even the the little gray squares, your enemies, resemble Total Annihilation's K-bots a great deal, with their legs going back and forth from the top down perspective. On a basic level, I'd say Blipzkrieg resembles TA quite a bit.

Of course there are differences, and this game has some shortcomings. I really think "Your battle suit is ready" makes a great beginning for a great game, and a great story. Why not take that and run with it? That line alone has so much potential for a great story. You could write an entire book with that as the originating idea. Maybe that's how TA came to be.

Unfortunately, I don't think the creators of Blipzkrieg had such lofty plans for their work as I would have liked. There's pretty much no narration at all after the first few levels, and even there the narration is very limited. Also, the one piece of music, while I did like it, is all there is and repeats over and over. And I wasn't too happy with the interface. As someone else mentioned, it's easy to get your "commander" stuck against a wall. I would have liked it to allow several kinds of control that perhaps could be toggled back and forth. The ability to have your commander run by holding a key--like Shift--would also have been nice, since the game gives you know way to speed up while you're in the middle of drawing a path. And of course the graphics are nothing to write home about.

Anyway, I figure Blipzkrieg probably deserves a 3/5, but I gave it a 4. Maybe someday a sequel could be made, hopefully with an interesting plot, a little more music, and with some fixes made to the interface.

@Mar

@Fuzzyevil. I did not realize that! Wow, that makes the last level SO much easier!

Thx Jomn and Asmiroth. That was what i needed to do lvl 28.

Double cliking to focus towers on a point is quite an essential piece of information to this game. That really should have been part of the tutorial.

@Iconian: Glad you liked the writing. :) I absolutely loved TA, but it wasn't a conscious inspiration for us. Now I want to go back and play it again.

There was really so much more we wanted to do with story and gameplay, but this was also a *prototype* of the gameplay for us, and we wanted to get it out there for people to give feedback on before getting too invested in it.

We're also bringing the game to mobile, and hopefully you'll get the see the idea a bit more fully realized there.

@Skjalldyr: Yeah, there are several things that we didn't have a good place to teach (like aiming towers, clicking your leader to blast nearby enemies, rapidly clicking the endpoint for a bigger speed boost). Hopefully we can do a more direct tutorial in a future version to specifically teach them.

@noonat: Ha! I knew it! I've found that once a game like TA gets in your blood it stays with you a long time. Even if it wasn't a conscious influence on Blipzkrieg, you borrowed enough elements from TA that I really can't help seeing the resemblance, like seeds planted long ago that now have a chance to grow. Can I ask though what conscious influences that you had for the game? Anything in particular or more an agglomeration?

I'd definitely say it was a good idea to the test the waters before getting into too far into making a big game. What do you think so far? Are there enough people who like it to make a sequel?

Anyway, I'd really like to see more of a story and more missions in either an expansion or a sequel. Most of the missions were pretty short, and I'd really like to see what direction this ends up taking storywise.

@Iconian: More of an agglomeration, but if I had to pick my own three: Harbormaster, Darwinia, and Mobigame's Edge. As for people liking it, it seems to be a love hate thing right now, which is good. I think with better controls and a better tutorial it wouldn't be quite as polarizing.

I also wrote up a post-mortem here, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Great game! This is definitely one of my favorites.

About the level 29 surprise:

@noonat: Well, I've heard of Darwinia but never played it, and haven't even heard of the other two games you mentioned. So, maybe Blipzkrieg is a lot more like them than TA? But I sure still see a resemblance.

I read the postmortem. It actually reminds me of my own time writing fiction . . . I think it's really a learning process creating something new, whether it's a game or a book. I think I'll comment over there though.

I'm not completely sure but I think I've played this game a couple of years back already.