In Excubitor, you play a lone starfighter who responds to a distress call from a special research ship named Antares that was investigating a powerful commodity known as Voidshards. Some unknown sentient force with a huge army of drones and other various ships of war stands in your way of protecting Antares. The game takes place in 2182 in a different star system with battles fought both in space and on the surfaces of various planets.
While you’re clearly out-numbered, you’re not necessarily out-gunned. You’ll pilot the Hammerhead, a badass ship that can be upgraded with seventeen different kinds of weapons (although just two at a time to start) and deploy defense turrets as well. In between missions, simply visit the Armory to spend Voidshards to purchase new weapons as they become unlocked which happens as you progress through the campaign. Existing weapons can also be upgraded three times to do various things like increase damage, reduce cooldown, increase the number of shots per “trigger-pull” and so forth. In the Armory, weapons are shown in a large 3D-view and they’re nicely detailed. Stats like Damage, Cooldown, Cost, and Target Radius are all provided, as well as a fairly lengthy description of the weapon itself. Even better, you can demo a weapon before committing to buy it by entering the test area, which takes you back to the same Tutorial area that pits you against simulated enemies. The quantity and variety of weapons is pretty great, allowing player preference and the nature of the mission to dictate what you take into battle. Each weapon can also be assigned to either LT or RT.
The Armory is essential in between missions but almost as often you’ll want to tend to the Hammerhead itself. With modules, you can upgrade the ship’s Shield, Armor, Engines, and Weapons. These allotments are tightly controlled compared to the goods available in the Armory, and if you feel like you’ve gone down the wrong path you can Reset your allotment which is nice.
When you’re set for battle, the mission select screen presents a detailed breakdown of the scope of the mission and then you’re off. I will say that Excubitor surprised me with the amount of backstory and explanation that was provided about the star system, the ships, and events. Much of this could have simply been left out or glossed over, and for the type of game it is, it probably wouldn’t have mattered a great deal. But that Tesseract put the time into creating a more well-rounded universe is noted and appreciated. Anyway, once deployed in battle, Antares’ AI will inform you of the objectives, typically this boils down to “protect Antares until its specific mission or task is done.” Often times there are some type of environmental aid that the player can leverage to help repel the onslaught of enemies. These can be a device that you have to physically fly over to and activate from time to time or maybe a defensive structure like hiding behind a large asteroid during the first boss battle. In addition, there is typically a Bonus objective available that forces you to juggle your time extra carefully, but can yield extra Voidshards and a higher mission rank. Fortunately, the playable areas tend to be fairly tight so it doesn’t take but a few seconds to fly from one end of the ‘arena’ to the other. Dodge and Turbo controls mapped to the Bumpers (I played on an Xbox One controller) are vital for zipping about the map and dodging incoming fire.
Simply firing back with your own guns and those automated turrets on the Antares is not at all sufficient though, which is where the tower defense gameplay comes in. A simple metric shows you how much power you can supply and its this value that governs how many defense mechanisms you can purchase and deploy. The deployments have to go in specifically marked slots that are strategically placed. Turrets can be upgraded to increase their effectiveness and you don’t have to worry about accidentally damaging them yourself with friendly fire nor repairing them. The turrets work well and tend to take care of themselves, especially when working in conjunction with other ones and when you upgrade them.
So typical mission flow sees you trying to survive about six waves of increasingly challenging enemy attacks. They’ll attack from multiple angles and with a variety of ships, and pretty quickly in each mission you’re to the point where there is always something to be done, be it adding more defenses, upgrading what you got, activating an environmental aid, or working on a bonus objective. The pacing gets pretty frenzied, exactly what bullet hell and tower defense games go for.
On the presentation side of the equation, it’s a mixed offering. Graphically, it has that glossy, Unreal-engine look to it that works for it. On my i7-4790k/16GB/GTX970, I was able to comfortably run this at 2560×1080, Fullscreen, and Ultra detail. Individual graphical tweaks include Quality, Texture Quality, Antialiasing, Anisotropic, Shadows, Vsync, Motion Blur, and SSAO. The game looks and plays smoothly, but one area where it left much to be desired was the soundtrack, which is nigh absent. Personally I felt a Command & Conquer vibe to this game given the sci-fi themes, the base, and the ability to place defensive structures, so a soundtrack inspired by C&C or Shatter would have been great. Instead, little to no soundtrack exists, putting all of the emphasis on the sound effects. The effects are fine, but sound ‘lonely’ if you know what I mean by not having a complimentary soundtrack to set the tone and atmosphere.
In closing, Excubitor gets more right than it does wrong, and while I’m not an aficionado of either the tower defense or bullet hell genres, it felt to me like Tesseract struck a nice blend of both here. Let’s get to the summary…
