Alpha One - Sandbox Grand Sci Fi Space Mining Tactics

what's up guys and gals and welcome back to the nerd castle today in our coverage for the steam next fest we've got alpha one and i don't even really truly know how to describe this game this game's a little bit of a weirdy like it's kind of one part kind of turn-based strategy where you're setting up bases and building outposts in space to like harvest and mine from nebulas and sort of like asteroid clusters and things of things of that nature but there's also like combat with like defense guns that's done in the real time and you fly around kind of asteroid style with newtonian physics and you get into gun fights with aliens and things of that nature it's an odd game and yet everything that i've seen about it so far i played through the first level on my own makes me think that there's a high level of quality going on into this one everything that i've played around with so far from the ui to the sound effects to the soundtrack to the voice acting is all quite good in fact the pixel art is very very good looking and honestly if this game is made by like one guy he's putting in some serious work on this one so we're gonna dive on in today for about 25 30 minutes see if it's something you wanted to add to your wish list or otherwise pass on if after watching this that is indeed your intent i've got a link for you down below it's going to be next to my discord my twitch stream if you want to hang out live and let's go ahead and start a new game because we're operating on limited time as you enter through the temporal device your state of shock begins to wear are you really going through portals and time rifts it all seems surreal what are you doing out here all alone how did this happen you wonder how you will know if the temporal device actually worked could you be caught in some kind of temporal loop how many times have you done this before suddenly you remember that you encountered other beings out here and life exists outside of earth although they were frightening oh no dude and there you go updating temporal causality loop detected events are repeating the first temporal device devices in place continue to do the same for each remaining fracture proceed so ultimately your goal in this game is that there's like these time rifts that are opening up in space and all i can tell is that you're like a glorified hyper technological janitor whose job it is to sweep up these riffs and make them go away so that they don't interrupt like the normal flow of space-time but honestly anything with a time travel narrative is always way over my head like me big stupid dumb and so i haven't quite grasped what you're doing in this game quite yet but i have figured out how to play the game so that's good let's go ahead and we will go to timefracture1254b so here we are this is the world map ultimately from what i can tell our job is that in each sector there's going to be a damaged kind of temporal stabilizer we have to like repair it by finding parts inside the area and by mining and doing upgrades and research and stuff like that once we get it fully updated it closes down the rift and then we use the jump gate to go back to the central hub where we look for another rift and so we've got to go back to our base real quick it looks like let's see i don't think anything's attacking our base right now this is us inside this little pod right here it's basically like a little space fighter it has different options that it can do on a given turn and for right now the tutorial wants us to travel back to our stations so that's what we will do do we want to mine in the alpha star system absolutely let's go a minon and then once we've got that all queued up it doesn't actually like happen we've got to commence the turn basically oh okay all right what's up asteroid how you doing it's nice to meet you with my face thanks for swinging through so what you'll notice is a lot of these asteroids right here will have like kind of bluey crystals inside of them our job is to collect said bluey crystals now there's really no strafing in this game or anything of the sort you pretty much just thrust in the direction you want to go and then you thrust and adjust that's what i've been calling and it's even got like a nice little rhyme so you can remember however it does take some getting used to because the game controls pretty much exactly like asteroids if you've ever played that old arcade classic there's also no backwards thrust so like once you're moving there's really no way to stop yourself except to about face turn back around and do your thing the one utility that we do have available is the q key which allows us to dash in a direction very quickly on a short cooldown and in fact in combat that is very very useful against aliao okay it's very very useful against aliens for getting yourself clear of like sticky situations and dancing around them so that they can't return fire dude why are these like curving oh my god even the rocks want me dead this is not geologist approved let's go back to base by holding down the r key it's going to give us a synopsis of everything we mined in this area and then it's going to give us a new objective to play around with all right so on our turn the lab for research is now open inside the lab we can do all kinds of interesting things like upgrading our guns and making them stronger in fact i really like the lab interface in this game it's quite good so this is the lab interface right here it's comprised of a refinery a build queue it's also got a repair station for fixing our ship and getting its hp back because damage is persistent in this game so damage you take in the preceding battles carries over on into later battles and part of how you use your build points and your resources is deciding whether or not you want to make new facilities or whether you want to keep your ship flying for right now what we want to look at is this little menu up here and in this analog menu it wants me to upgrade my mining and so basin outpost will now harvest 100 of the resources in the system they inhabit every turn increases your range by one we'll go ahead and buy that and it's all ready to rock so we'll go back on over to the turn-based interface and as you can see for being stationed inside an asteroid belt now this base that we're currently operating is giving us 30 crystals per turn and that's a pretty big come up that saves you a lot of busy work the other thing that we need to do oh it wants me to deploy my lards or my lrr deeds uh so like i don't know exactly how these all work but i think you shoot them all over the galaxy and they act basically as like fog of war removers anywhere you see kind of the smoky business this is fog of war and you've got to get it cleared either by like rubbing your face against it aggressively or by sending an lrd out and so the lrds have been deployed and then i want to travel over to here so that we can get maximum clearance in one turn and it looks like there was possibly either a mining opportunity or combat in this area looks like it's combat on the bottom right radar we have a listing for red contacts down there you can see them headed towards us we're going to want to take these guys out because the aliens are trying to mine in the exact same place that we're mining in so i'm going to go ahead and see if i can wipe this ship out real fast by just kind of like out maneuvering him and taking as few shots as possible while i'm in the neighborhood there it is and then we want to kill his miner too because his miner is scooping up the limited loot that exists inside the zone and so he's going to make this difficult there we go we killed him off and we stole all of his mining resources on top of that it looks like he pooped out a couple of gold coins which like i don't really care where the coins come from as long as it scrubs off properly it also looks like down in the bottom right hand corner we've actually got a ton of asteroids which may speed up our harvesting process love the sound effects in this game i think they did a really good job picking the gun sounds and then on top of that the crumbling kind of grinding noises of the asteroid field very very nice and easy on the ears to listen to i like it a lot it's very bassy it's very plosive it's got a lot of punch to it well i crashed into an asteroid sucks it wasn't very badass there we go we'll kind of like skip our way on in here and it looks like all the resources have been depleted from the system so we're not going to be able to gather any more let's go ahead and warp out and so this time around we got ourselves 15 resources from there and then we got ourselves 30 resources from our original base mining and now we've got five build points that we can use to either fix our ship or build new facilities kind of new scouts things of that nature let's see what we found so we found one of the portal segments inside that area floating a drift in the void you find a built segment of the temporal device that you need to build to get home this is damn peculiar eight of these is your ticket out of here so there we go and then it gets added onto the station right there it looks like here the dromic star system it is crystal poor and it's unclaimed crystal resources can be used to research non-weapon technology yeah you want gas for weapon technology he found another portal segment keep in mind this is the first level so tracking down the portal segments is obviously going to be a lot easier on this one since they're giving you a little bit of a test run and so there's three portal segments that we picked up in one turn there's a couple left to go so inside of dromix what we could do is the game wants me to deploy an outpost we only have like this one outpost at a time if you look at our base it's got these little circles basically things can be mounted inside the circles whether or not they're defense guns or outposts or those little scout guys that we had effectively you should think of them as kind of like consumable slots that you're putting consumable space technology inside of while you're trying to figure out where you want to deploy it i don't really want to deploy this anywhere but the tutorial is going to make me deploy it right here i don't feel like we need more crystals but i really really like the sequence by which this gets into position and as you can see we now control this zone and so what this little hashed area is that they just showed you is that's called your defense zone uh you'll notice that there's an option to defend and guard on these lists right here if you go into defend mode basically what it means is if any enemies try to enter that area so if you've got bogies that are aliens or whatever and they try to enter your control zone it basically automatically kills them and you can skip out on the defense battle in exchange for giving up your turn so basically it's like the lazy man's auto resolve but it seems to always work out in your favor from all the testing that i've done let's go ahead and travel down to here and see what we find it looks like we did not find much oh never mind we found a portal segment hurray for me all right throw that thing on there no enemy invasions coming trust me you'll know when an enemy invasion's coming you get like these little arrows and stuff that basically plot their course to get to your territory and so i don't think we have to bypass our turn for right now this area had nothing inside of it except for maybe an item there it is so we found an outpost vessel which is what we deployed over here in order to start mining even more heavily in the area at the moment we do have 145 crystals i would recommend that we kind of like spend those i don't know if your upgrades stay into the second level but i'm planning on cutting this long enough to where we can find out so i can increase the range that my ship can travel or i can make it so that we mine more quickly we have enough for both let's take the range so that i can teleport too and then we'll also take the mining research update yeah that'll work fine now i should have a little collector drone that's around my ship when i go into mining areas that'll grab stuff for me if i remember correctly let's go ahead and travel into that zone right there and we'll just keep clearing out this fog of war until the gate is fixed and then we will get the hell on out of here and see what surprises are await for us in the next level okay no contact no problems in that zone we found repair nanites sensors detect an abandoned alien research lab scanning through the ancient machinery your drone finds a vial with active repair nanites this is used to repair a broken panel okay we also get five coins for that too so what you'll see here is if we go to our research panel it's going to give you like a fun little animation right here and inside the repair bay as you can see it has now fixed the repair bay so we now have the ability to repair outposts that have been attacked by aliens to repair bases that have been attacked by aliens to repair the ship the fighter that we're currently flying if we need to and uh pretty pretty good stuff right there there we go my pod's all good to go and we still have six points remaining i can also increase my range although i don't think i'm gonna need it right now so we'll go ahead and throw that together we can move three parsecs now sweet dude if i knew what a parsec was that might be helpful parsec sounds like some kind of wine do you be like hey you got that red parsec you had last time pour out that parsec bro oh this is actually a mining area with aliens in it okay well since we've got extra terrestrials around let's go ahead and run them out of our mining zone real quick kind of boosted into the bullets right there that may have been a mistake in tactics he took that meteor to the face for me though so that's good there we go wipe him out and then where's his little buddy at there's his little buddy who's huffing all my gas man i got to protect my gas fields because gas is going to allow me to upgrade my guns and make them hit harder which will make all of these little engagements a little bit less obnoxious with the aliens so there you go we won the battle with the aliens we got a bunch of coins it looks like we have enough storage left or at least there's enough capacity left in the zone to get three more gases and so my little drones taking care of that for me gotta love the automated gathering go get em little joni the droney that's why you're my friend little buddy that's why i appreciate you and so we got five coins out of that we got 15 gas and another 45 ore out of the area and then whatever might have been nestled in this area anyways so it looks like it's basically just gas harvesting over here what i want to do then is i want to deploy my base over to here so that it defends the gas field ah we have enemies incoming okay yeah i don't know what that means man you're gonna have to translate that either way i'm deploying this to the gas fields because i want the gas fields to be mine perfect all right and then over here we're going to defend and we'll just wait a turn and see what happens and actually looks like the aliens bailed out once we reinforced the position so that's good downside is it teleported me all the way back to base during the defense phase so that's kind of a bummer on the plus side we do have enough to upgrade our weapon and i think that's a really good idea shooty shooty bang bangs are something that excite me i'm gonna fix up my pod real fast pods all nice and looking snazzy new paint job everything's feeling contiguous and then we've got one in energy weapon tech i think okay and then the other thing i think was just like defense basically we want to travel up to there and grab the last piece of our portal so that's exactly what we're gonna do there is no mining mission here and there's no aliens around so we don't need to defend it that's always good news when you're not getting shot at by random large eyed aliens there's our last piece of the portal right there so boom boom the thing's fixed it's ready to be spun up and get us out of here let's go ahead and we'll just run defense for one turn it takes a turn to spin up the base then hopefully after that we'll also have enough technology to upgrade our armor and make our gun a little bit better i'm sorry make our defense a little bit better there you go the home button has been displayed and we can get the hell out of here let's upgrade our defenses real fast so we've got one more level of defense and then i'll probably take 999 for the next okay for the i'm guessing the 999 is stuff that's supposed to be disabled for the purposes of the demo but we're done with range research so that's good uh we can't get the fourth level of range research inside the demo but we can jump like four parsecs out when we need to let's go ahead and hit it [Music] [Music] i kind of love how the developer of this game is like all in on every little detail it's not just like a static splash screen that tells you that one it's actually like a full on pixel art video of like the the portal firing up and arcing lightning and stuff like that like just little details like that matter so much when it comes to really making a game stick in somebody's mind uh we've completed the level so let's go to the next one as you enter through the temporal device your state of shock begins to wear are you really going through portals and time rifts it all seems so surreal oh they hit me with another one huh okay fair enough uh we've got a new time portal up here we already did that one so that one's already been synced up with the rift basically so we got to go to this guy right here and honestly i haven't seen the second level so i'm actually kind of excited about what may transpire here like this is one of those games at the level of like interesting ui decisions and sort of like analog switches things look different and i'm back yeah well these aliens seem friendly they're singing the same lullaby my mom used to sing every night at bedtime all right so there's an enemy class one ship oh it wants me to start right there i guess i'll start right there then it doesn't look like we keep any of our stuff and it looks like all of our upgrades got reset as well so it looks like each mission is actually self-contained and there's not really like a meta progression like you're just playing on kind of consistently harder maps doing the same thing and getting further on in your research looks like we're harvesting something new right here there are enemies around those so i would suggest that we go deal with them first before they steal all of our resources technically who's to say they don't actually own this area like it might actually be their resources and they may actually have the deed to the kingdom i'm just going to back him up real quick and then i want to go after his little harvester buddy where's he at he's going to be running for it pretty soon so we need to kill him yeah he's got all the resources from the zone inside his hold so he needs to die like right now yeah he almost got away with it all almost all right we'll blast our way out of there and let's see what this new resource is for what does it do so we got 15 of those resources right there and our orbital is still harvesting crystals very nice so what do the red crystals do metal resources can be used to research weapon and defects technology okay so basically gas allows you to get gas weapons and allows you to have gas defense this right here apparently it looks like they've got kind of a rock paper scissors system of like different elements blocking other different elements and damaging other elements and i sort of dig that idea i like it when games have sort of like a round-robin triumvirate idea for how they want to handle damage models so anyways we can use this to research weapon and defense technology beautiful did we find anything inside the zone like anything spiffy anyways i don't see any invasion forces oh never mind there they are i do like the sort of x-com like classic inspired alien noises you're getting from right there yeah let's go ahead and do uh defend right here i guess i'm not sure if i did what they wanted me to do i may have accidentally not done what they wanted maybe they wanted me to guard the system instead i think they wanted me to guard the system instead we got more enemies coming too resource refinery is now available cool i love this menu right here this menu is so old school and straight out of something like syndicate or like mech warrior 2. like i really really like this menu over here we can get mining drones we can afford that right now i'm going to go with like jump range though instead because we're gonna need to move around a bit so we can convert our resources into bp oh and then from there we can build new stuff so we're gonna be funneling a lot of our goodies so there's kind of a risk reward mechanic on like how much do you want to spend turning things into build points and getting new technologies or how much do you want to use to upgrade your own personal craft i can dig that let's go ahead and beef with these guys in this little quadrant over here collecting some more metal probably won't hurt anyways and i'm waiting for crystals to kind of tick up to begin with and so oh wow there's a bunch of you guys huh yeah it looks like everybody's got something to say to splat this time around uh i'm gonna stay on his harvester this time around actually oh that's a that's a big ship right there that's a big old chunk boy ship i don't know if we can kill him i'm gonna stay on his aft right here i don't know if i killed him or if he warped out and went like invisible i can't particularly decide i'm a little vexed by what just happened i don't know if it was like a display bug in the sense that he just like vanished because he doesn't have a death animation yet oh no he got away i think he like jumped out or something yeah i think he got away with the resources i think he zoned out i think maybe the evac is along the edge of the zone kind of like in mountain blade warband and if you get there you kind of just phase out of existence it's something we didn't get much out of it but we got like a little bit and so he's run back to wherever he came from and it looks like we have another attack coming in too oh nice the build factory is now open what does that do oh we can build a new ship so we can basically we can either build outposts we can build a new ship create a gun ship to protect an outpost or base can only be outfitted with one weapon or defense the cost will vary by technology and then we've got the lrds over here and then apparently i can manufacture my own device segments too if i've got the right bits and pieces for it i don't have the money for the outpost i can throw a little bit in right there i guess i'll sell everything i need 80 oh i'm like flat tapped out okay i would like to i would like to fix my ship too it's kind of beat up right now it's a little smoky at the moment it's smokier than a bowling alley in the 80s right now i do want to deploy the lrrd do i get like a batch of these oh i do i think i get like three of them nice okay well that means i don't really need to scout like they'll take care of it for me can i make a couple more actually like i have the build points for it right there we go let's get a couple more of those guys right there and we'll kind of just hope they don't get attacked by anything perfect now you you are going to guard and you're going to guard right here because they are coming in hot they are coming in heavy and they are coming in spicy my friend really wish i had a mining drone or something right now when you go on guard mode it lets you zone into the map early to harvest resources before the aliens even get there in case you're wondering what guard is versus defend defend effectively like wipes out the wave guard lets you enter the system early to grab everything you can before the aliens get here it's basically kind of like a free shopping spree round so they're little harvesters doing his business out here uh we've got a whole bunch of enemy fighters i do think we're gonna need some gun upgrades pretty soon all right dash out of the way of that [Music] dude what are you doing on my battlefield right here what are you doing you're a harvester you're not meant for war you better retreat my friend you better fall back good thing they're dropping build points because my ship got scuffed my ship has felt better nice okay so we defended the zone or at least we guarded it from enemy patrols and we got a bunch of build points so technically i think our repairs should basically be free over here it looks like we found energy resources okay and an enemy base there's an alien lab for metal weapons over here so we get the upgrade to metal one so that'll be nice and then we found a defender vessel floating a drift in the void you find a fully functioning gunship defender this should not be possible gunships are used to defend your outposts and your main base i can live with that we'll deploy the gun ship when and where we need it it looks like we've still got one guy kind of like dithering in this system i don't know what these little chevrons are right here that are filling up but there's an enemy outpost over here so maybe takes 30 to get each of those okay i kind of want to get some upgrades first go ahead and repair up the ship and i think we just got to sit on our hands for a minute and see if we can get like any type of upgrade here can i deploy this little dude i don't have an outpost over here so i don't think he can defend it uh we'll go ahead and run guard patrol one more time on this spot while we wait for the crystals and everything to stack up so that we can get our mining drone and so that we can get our metal gun upgrade and then from there i think life is probably going to get a little bit easier uh we do however appear to have a frigate coming on in to mess with us and so we'll want to keep an eye on that contingency i'm going gonna kind of head down into this corner oh sweet dude oh yeah okay yeah that's a gun that's got some sexy built into it may gusta i bet it hits harder too oh the enemies keep consistent damage oh the gun overheats okay so you can't really spam it and it looks like he bails out after a little bit i like this gun because i can hit them a lot further away and kind of shut down their mining efforts we'll just joust with them for a minute combat feels very very fluid and very controllable by the way like there's there's absolutely no problem with the control scheme it takes a little bit to get used to kind of like the newtonian physics of the whole thing and like the slippy slidey business that it's got going on but it does feel intended and it does feel good did they send out another harvester bro that better not be another harvester i'm about to lose my mind these aliens are persistent man oh i overheated my gun okay we're going to kind of want to just roll around for a minute till we get him knocked out there we go oh it appears as though i have limited ammo though too [Music] huh what happens when that runs out so apparently that gun is infinite and that gun has limited shots per engagement all right i'll keep that in mind so we got a little bit of metal the enemies got away with a couple because we were beefing with that frigate for a little while i need that frigate to go away that thing needs to die wait how did they run me out of there i thought i won i feel like i killed a lot of them okay so i did one more mission to defend this little asteroid belt over here and we do actually have the resources now to upgrade our defenses too so that'll be nice our enemy's energy weapon damage will apparently be going down from what i can tell there we go and i would very much like to grab the mining drone as well while we're in the neighborhood i am going to sell those and sell those to get my cash up because i've got to repair this guy right here that leaves us 10 shy of being able to build a outpost so we're gonna need to take another fight or two my recommendation would be that we hit this outpost over here maybe that'll slow down some of the enemy spawns and make them a little bit less likely to mess with us this will also give us a little bit of gas which i think we can use to actually upgrade our main gun uh yeah there's there's there's a lot of enemies here yeah this might be a situation okay let's drag the fight oh okay so we're like confined i was gonna try to drag them sort of away from the engagement area oh wow i mean we are hurting it so that's good as to whether or not we're hurting it as badly as it's hurting us difficult to say at this juncture all right we're out of bullets for our long range sniper gun let's go in for strafing fire oh okay apparently you can't travel through him i was thinking we kind of just roll through for a minute you know slide through let them know that we've got them on notice oh you used to have an outpost now you don't uh this guy is messing me up though we need to we need to outrun this boy oh he's running for it those guys like to run man they don't like to die like they definitely bail out on you the second they see it going sideways ship's a little ship's a little rough not not not crazy happy about how our ship's looking right now could be better on the plus side took out their outpost which is very very nice for us uh they're coming back on into attack right here but we haven't claimed the zone yet and so i'm going to sell you i'm going to sell you for now just for now we're going to get our outpost built that leaves us with 31 left for repairs so we'll just like you know spit and bubble gum man spit bubble gum duct tape that thing back together and then we have the outpost right here and i would like for the outpost to i don't really care where the outpost goes i guess gas would be nice so that we can level up our default gun so we'll go ahead and replace their outpost with our outpost huzzah space colonialism uh i do want to put this gunship okay so the gun ship is now in this zone protecting this area perfect and now we can run a defend op which means whenever they try to come into our territory we should just kind of get the upper hand and kill them i think or not that's also a cool option give me the metal gun real quick oh we got one of their big gun ships very nice couldn't have asked for a better resolution i can't stay here in mine for a minute so i think i should so i guess i was wrong about the way defend works like i'm still not exactly sure like i thought defend intercepts and destroys any fleet moving inside your controlled like contiguous territory sans combat but apparently i was wrong about that maybe it's only when they're like the little expeditionary scout forces and not necessarily the larger like gunboat frigates that are actually trying to kill you in the face holes all right we got all of our resources what were you shooting at man you're just shooting at meteors is that it i think he's just like harvesting meteors i think says the area is depleted so like let's just bail i out this juice box done gone crackly on us all right how far does this map go because like we've got these outposts here oh it wants me to manufacture my own ring on this one i forgot about that that we could build from inside the build from inside the menu all right so on this turn what i want to do is i want to dump everything i have in crystals into building i want to get another outpost up and running so that we can harvest three separate resources because that's going to mean that we're going to end up with a lot of things we can use to basically protect ourselves it's only 14 to repair my ship that leaves us with a surplus we don't have enough gas to do anything with our energy weapons for right now however the good news is we don't have any enemy invasions happening either so i'm probably just gonna go on defense and we'll just wait for resources to show up oh they did attack well there you go this game is called alpha one man i find it very very curious and yet i'm super into it it kind of like the stylings of the the stylings of the pixel art are so good that it kind of reminds me of halcyon i don't know if you ever played that game but it's a good-looking game and it's a good feeling game and even though it's a little bit weird and esoteric in its intent i think that it's good like there's enough attention to detail when it comes to the soundtrack and the sounds and the punchiness of the guns and the voice overs and the graphics and everything else that i think they're onto something here it's weird but i like it my name is splattercat i sift through the pile to find what's worthwhile in the world of indie games every single day so you don't have to today up on the chopping block we had alpha one tomorrow we will have something else thank you for hanging out with me i appreciate you spending your limited free time just chilling with your boys splatty and then other than that i will catch you all later bye everybody

Channel: SplatterCatGaming

Views: 88,137

Keywords: Alpha one gameplay, alpha one walkthrough, alpha one playthrough, lets play alpha one, alpha one review, alpha one preview, alpha one impressions, alpha one guide, alpha one tutorial, alpha one trailer, alpha one soundtrack, alpha one music, alpha one demo, alpha one release, alpha one steam, alpha one download

Id: cyGgNPRZlkI

Length: 38min 33sec (2313 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 20 2022