Take Porco Rosso, sprinkle in giant planes from Mirai Shonen Conan, add a brewing minigame and you get The Brew Barons, a game came out yesterday after three people spent four years toiling away at it.
The story goes that the idyllic Adila Bay is besieged by Brew Pirates who force on poor citizens low-quality brews; but two heroes decide to stand up against the pirates, one pint at a time, under the name of The Brew Barons.
The game is divided into two main parts: an arcadey flight part where you go around the bay, delivering brews to local pubs, collecting ingredients, and shooting down pirates; and a management side, where you create your own brews, bottle them, and sell to others or serve at your own bar. By exploring the map and reaching different islands you get new characters you can assign to boost your brewery's and bar's efficiency. About these characters: I though at first they were Kickstarter backers, but I think they are not-so-subtly modified portraits of famous actors: Dijana looks very similar to Angelina Jolie, and I've also recruited a Patrick Steward look-alike, though with a bit more alcoholistic side.
TBB fully supports HOTAS, and i you are going to use it, be sure to also have pedals at the ready, otherwise you'll have to move hands between HOTAS and keyboard to use the rudder. The Thurstmaster Warthog and Saitek pedals are automatically recognised and have preset controls, though I had to change rudder controls as they were originally assigned to toe brakes. Unfortunately developers chose non-standard button names, and while "thumb red button" on the control column is easy enough to understand, "thumb slider forward" on the throttle is not, so the first thing you have to do is to familiarise yourself with the controls, also because the tutorial didn't display correctly buttons assigned to them.
TBB is somewhat rough around the edges, the tutorial didn't spawn the final goal the first time, forcing me to restart from scratch. The brewing procedure didn't activate the yeast procedure and I wasted a load of perfectly fine ingredients. The interface is a bit clincky, and some menus don't get clicks the first time around, especially when switching locations around your base and selecting who crews what.
On the other hand, the game performs, and after the initial load, there are no loading screens I can think of.
Your plane is equipped with water-powered abilities and weapons; your plane has a water tank that gets depleted whenever you boost, fire your guns, or drop bombs; and is replenished by flying at low level over water at speeds higher than 40 KTS. This means you have essentially inifinte ammo, but you will have to break off engagements to dive towards the water to "reload" your guns.
Guns and bombs aren't only used to fight off pirates, but also to harvest ingredients: you see an apple tree, you shoot it, apples pop out, you flying towards the apples, and you collect them. Same thing for grapes, giant dandelions, and anything that grows on trees. Potatoes, pumpking, carrots, and similar are instead harvested by dropping water bombs. Wheat? Well, you simply fly low to the ground over a wheat field and your propeller will cut it for you.
You can collect messages in a bottle found at see in the same way, while to salvage sunked vessels you need to land and play the physics-based winch minigame.
Once the cargo hold is full, you get back to base and brew some good old alcohol.
You first select up to three ingredients that sum up to a 100 items, add yeast to increase the alcohol percentage, and then chose between ferment or distill to get different types of beverages: beer, rum, brandy, vodka, wine...their taste and quality given by the ingredients used. The brewing minigame is not particularly hard but to accomplish contract you need to pay attention to beverage type, quality, and minimum/maximum alcohol percentage.
How you stil your bar you get different bonuses on the type of beverages your patrons will look for, which in turn will lead you to purchase improvement for your brewery.
Once you are done, it's back to the skies to make deliveries, collect ingredients, and explore Adila Bay to expand your recipe collection and potential customers.
Pirates right now have been content sitting wherever they are, and it's a good thing as combat is not particularly good...maybe it's because you're using water guns against armoured pirate planes armed with "real" guns. The larger planes are invincible if not for their engines, and it doesn't feel as good as, for example, Crimson Skies. You do have two airplane types (light and heavy), but so far I haven't got enough money to build a second, heavier plane.
Fighting in your starting floatplane doesn't feel particularly exciting, and the game so far didn't have a story-based introduction to combat, I simply got bored of the usual ingredient-brew-delivery loop and wanted to try something new.
I like what I see but I fear its progression will be a bit too slow-placed for my tastes, and the game tries too many things without doing anything particularly well. I'll play some more and report back.
The story goes that the idyllic Adila Bay is besieged by Brew Pirates who force on poor citizens low-quality brews; but two heroes decide to stand up against the pirates, one pint at a time, under the name of The Brew Barons.
The game is divided into two main parts: an arcadey flight part where you go around the bay, delivering brews to local pubs, collecting ingredients, and shooting down pirates; and a management side, where you create your own brews, bottle them, and sell to others or serve at your own bar. By exploring the map and reaching different islands you get new characters you can assign to boost your brewery's and bar's efficiency. About these characters: I though at first they were Kickstarter backers, but I think they are not-so-subtly modified portraits of famous actors: Dijana looks very similar to Angelina Jolie, and I've also recruited a Patrick Steward look-alike, though with a bit more alcoholistic side.
TBB fully supports HOTAS, and i you are going to use it, be sure to also have pedals at the ready, otherwise you'll have to move hands between HOTAS and keyboard to use the rudder. The Thurstmaster Warthog and Saitek pedals are automatically recognised and have preset controls, though I had to change rudder controls as they were originally assigned to toe brakes. Unfortunately developers chose non-standard button names, and while "thumb red button" on the control column is easy enough to understand, "thumb slider forward" on the throttle is not, so the first thing you have to do is to familiarise yourself with the controls, also because the tutorial didn't display correctly buttons assigned to them.
TBB is somewhat rough around the edges, the tutorial didn't spawn the final goal the first time, forcing me to restart from scratch. The brewing procedure didn't activate the yeast procedure and I wasted a load of perfectly fine ingredients. The interface is a bit clincky, and some menus don't get clicks the first time around, especially when switching locations around your base and selecting who crews what.
On the other hand, the game performs, and after the initial load, there are no loading screens I can think of.
Your plane is equipped with water-powered abilities and weapons; your plane has a water tank that gets depleted whenever you boost, fire your guns, or drop bombs; and is replenished by flying at low level over water at speeds higher than 40 KTS. This means you have essentially inifinte ammo, but you will have to break off engagements to dive towards the water to "reload" your guns.
Guns and bombs aren't only used to fight off pirates, but also to harvest ingredients: you see an apple tree, you shoot it, apples pop out, you flying towards the apples, and you collect them. Same thing for grapes, giant dandelions, and anything that grows on trees. Potatoes, pumpking, carrots, and similar are instead harvested by dropping water bombs. Wheat? Well, you simply fly low to the ground over a wheat field and your propeller will cut it for you.
You can collect messages in a bottle found at see in the same way, while to salvage sunked vessels you need to land and play the physics-based winch minigame.
Once the cargo hold is full, you get back to base and brew some good old alcohol.
You first select up to three ingredients that sum up to a 100 items, add yeast to increase the alcohol percentage, and then chose between ferment or distill to get different types of beverages: beer, rum, brandy, vodka, wine...their taste and quality given by the ingredients used. The brewing minigame is not particularly hard but to accomplish contract you need to pay attention to beverage type, quality, and minimum/maximum alcohol percentage.
How you stil your bar you get different bonuses on the type of beverages your patrons will look for, which in turn will lead you to purchase improvement for your brewery.
Once you are done, it's back to the skies to make deliveries, collect ingredients, and explore Adila Bay to expand your recipe collection and potential customers.
Pirates right now have been content sitting wherever they are, and it's a good thing as combat is not particularly good...maybe it's because you're using water guns against armoured pirate planes armed with "real" guns. The larger planes are invincible if not for their engines, and it doesn't feel as good as, for example, Crimson Skies. You do have two airplane types (light and heavy), but so far I haven't got enough money to build a second, heavier plane.
Fighting in your starting floatplane doesn't feel particularly exciting, and the game so far didn't have a story-based introduction to combat, I simply got bored of the usual ingredient-brew-delivery loop and wanted to try something new.
I like what I see but I fear its progression will be a bit too slow-placed for my tastes, and the game tries too many things without doing anything particularly well. I'll play some more and report back.
Comment