Sitting on the uncomfortably bony knees of FTL and Rimworld, Trailblazers: Into The March doesn’t just ask you to survive the journey, but to be able to build, fuel and maintain your vessel throughout.
If, like me, you think that colony sims are actually incredibly cool games, especially when the population is kept nice and low, and feature both RPG-style traits and stats then great news because Trailblazers: Into the March is most definitely a game for you (us).
In Trailblazers: Into the March you take command of the crew of a landship, a large vehicle specifically built to help carry your crew through deadly marches. It’s not just a colonisation mission, however. Your vehicle is armed, and it needs to be as you’ll come under attack from similarly sized, weaponised vessels. Battles are, as my intro pretty clearly underlined, very similar to FTL, with the basics boiling down to you moving your crew to stations to active them… however, FTL’s roguelike, store, event and reward systems are out and crafting is in.
Now, by crafting I don’t mean rubbing six sticks together for a ladder – the technology level here is, of course, quite advanced and so everything has blueprints, however you’ll be gathering a lot of the resources that you need to build, repair and upgrade your ship as you go. Alongside that, you’ll also be tending to your colonist’s needs. Of course, they’ll all want to be healthy and have an oxygen supply, however they’ll also dance, read, listen to music, eat and smoke cigarettes as part of their Sims/RPG-style satisfaction and contentment systems.
‘Woah, woah, woah’, you might be thinking, ‘that’s a lot of stuff!’ You’re not wrong, however there’s a degree of autonomy at play as long as you keep the facilities built and intact. that means that most of your focus is building out your crew area while ensuring that you keep your vehicle battle-ready and don’t get more ambitious than your resources can manage. After all, you can’t overhaul a system if you don’t have the resources or if it’ll leave you short of necessities, and even if you are being measured, what’s that worth if your ship suddenly takes a shell directly to an important facility.
Initially, while playing an unmanned stand during Gamescom, I overconfidently guessed my way through the systems and took risks that I now know that I shouldn’t have. Because of that overconfidence I almost completely lost my playthrough as an enemy projectile took out my loading bay – the bay used to bring new materials into the ship. Soon enough I was repairing that area alongside the kitchens, while my crew despaired.
Trailblazers: Into the March is currently in development for PC.
