Bow To Blood: Last Captain Standing sets sail today
A pirate's life for TV
Bow To Blood: Last Captain Standing from Tribetoy is an odd beast - a VR-optional first person sky-ship shooter, framed as a Survivor-style space reality TV show and with light roguelike elements. It's out now on PC, expanded and free of its future-goggle requirements after a stint as a PlayStation VR exclusive. Players juggle steering their ship, directing its guns at larger foes, personally zapping smaller enemies with their sidearm from the deck, and directing crew to man various stations. It's all very strange and creative, and the PS4 original was well received. Below, a launch trailer.
While an odd mash-up of genres, the heart of Bow To Blood is a relatively straightforward vehicular shooter. Your noisy deck crew can be assigned to positions to give you boosts to engines, weapons, shields or sensors, but combat is mostly a matter of just looking in the direction of bad guys, locking on and letting your broadside laser-guns zap away. YouTuber "wolftooth" captured the first few minutes of the game here, including the tutorial, which should give you an idea of how the controls work with gamepad. The VR version is a little more intricate, with your sidearm being drawn from a holster at the side of the ship's wheel.
The overarching structure of the game is where it gets wacky. Inspired by Survivor, your goal is to be the top scoring captain at the end of a 'season' of trials. Each mission is an episode, providing scored objectives to complete, and an end-of-episode voting session to shift the balance of power. Playing exceptionally well and leaving other captains in the dust should render you immune to being voted off, but there are deals to be struck through multi-choice dialogues in order to earn aid or swing votes against someone. There's no do-overs, hence the vaguely roguelike part.
Bow To Blood: Last Captain Standing is out now on Steam for £13.94/€15.11/$17.99. It can be played with mouse and keyboard, gamepad, HTC Vive or Oculus Rift, although no mention of Windows Mixed Reality support, sadly.