I came across Solstice about two months ago, it has now been officially released on Android and Windows. Solstice is a real-time space conquest game in which you have to try and conquer/capture as many planets and hold them until the end of the game. Solstice is a nice game to have and play on your mobile device or your PC, because when you only have a few minutes to play something Solstice will fill the need for space time strategy. The max game session you can have is fifteen minutes and you can make your session easy or hard depending on the amount of planets you select to have in your sector or by adjusting the difficulty level.
Solstice was created by Deepseaweed with the Unity3D engine. Deepseaweed has been very responsive to feedback and is looking into adding more features to the game.
Since I don’t currently own a Android device I played the the windows version, my guess is that it probably plays better on Android than windows. For the most part the controls are very simple to understand and you will be playing in minutes. You use the mouse and buttons for all of the controls in the game, all you have to do is master the 3D camera view and then you will be able to move quickly through the game map. Deepseaweed is thinking about adding a few keyboard controls to the game to make it easier to switch from camera mode to combat/colonization mode. When you start off the game you can start colonizing all the planets right away if you want. But you might have a hard time holding them all so you might want to take a more less forward approach.
So what did I like about the game?
The concept and the ease of use. I also like the fact that it is on Android, Windows and MacOS. If I remember correctly I think Unity3D can make multi-platform games so maybe we might see a port to Linux and Apple IOS in the future. The framerates were good, I was always above 60fps while playing, so good job there. The items that I think need work are mainly cosmetic and music/sfx related. The planets themselves are different by class types so that is good so ship production is based on planet type. What i would like to see is better textures for these planets, some space combat style music and if possible some more pilot controls (like: patrol, retreat, defend). With Solstice having good framerates, more attention could be made to the visual aspects of Solstice to wow those gamers that only want visuals. Solstice has the basic real-time combat down, so I think it is a few enhancements away from being a really nice game to have on your Android device and/or PC/MacOS. So check it out and let us know your thoughts and comments on Solstice here in this posting or in the forums.
Deepseaweed is good about getting back to all questions and working on issues or just drop in to give this indie developer your support.
You can download the game for PC here: http://www.indiedb.c…stice/downloads or in the download area.
Or you can purchase the game for your Android device from here: Amazon App Store.
Here is a gameplay video of Solstice: