A very tight and addictive roguelike with an immensely satisfying core gameplay loop. The toolset at your disposal is very focused, essentially only giving you 3 options of what to do at any given moment - move (accelerate and steer), shoot tether, or swing; the variety comes from the various ship types, upgrades, and, most importantly, just the situations the game puts you in.
Both movement and combat take a bit of getting used to since it's unlikely that you will have seen either of those implemented quite like this before: for movement, you can only accelerate, decelerate, and turn - there is no backing up and no strafing, so dodging might prove more difficult than you would expect, and getting out of the way of some of the quicker attacks may prove impossible without swinging around some other object; for combat, you have no ways of dealing direct ranged damage - instead, you link together objects on the game field within a certain range, making them collide into each other, essentially making the entire map, including enemy ships and occasionally spawning hazmat containers, into ammo. Alternatively, you could try to rip off the enemy ships' attachments (turrets, rocket batteries, torpedo bays, etc.) which requires more careful aiming.
That pretty much summarizes the entire game loop, and while it sounds pretty simplistic, there is a huge amount of decision-making happening, both moment-to-moment, introduced by enemy positioning and attack patterns (especially in the later levels as the complexity ramps up considerably), and long-term, represented by picking upgrades every few ways, some of which can significantly affect your playstyle.
Red Tether also hides a surprising amount of content - initially, it presents as a rather small project, but as you keep attempting runs, more and more upgrades, ships, materials, and mechanics get unveiled. There are no permanent stat increases between attempts, and the whole game is definitely beatable with the starter ship, but there is still a ton of stuff to keep things fresh on subsequent runs (for an anecdotal example - at the time of writing, over 30 hours in, I'm still nowhere near unlocking all of the available ships - it is quite possible that I'm just bad at the game, but something tells me those numbers will be similar for most of the players). On the presentation side - the visuals are clean and beautiful, and the music is bangin, so absolutely no complaints in that department.
Essentially, if you are looking for games that aim to do one thing, and do it outstandingly well; if you enjoy mastering mechanics and feeling your skill level go up rather than just your stats; if you like playing games simply for the satisfaction the gameplay brings - Red Tether is an easy recommend.
Both movement and combat take a bit of getting used to since it's unlikely that you will have seen either of those implemented quite like this before: for movement, you can only accelerate, decelerate, and turn - there is no backing up and no strafing, so dodging might prove more difficult than you would expect, and getting out of the way of some of the quicker attacks may prove impossible without swinging around some other object; for combat, you have no ways of dealing direct ranged damage - instead, you link together objects on the game field within a certain range, making them collide into each other, essentially making the entire map, including enemy ships and occasionally spawning hazmat containers, into ammo. Alternatively, you could try to rip off the enemy ships' attachments (turrets, rocket batteries, torpedo bays, etc.) which requires more careful aiming.
That pretty much summarizes the entire game loop, and while it sounds pretty simplistic, there is a huge amount of decision-making happening, both moment-to-moment, introduced by enemy positioning and attack patterns (especially in the later levels as the complexity ramps up considerably), and long-term, represented by picking upgrades every few ways, some of which can significantly affect your playstyle.
Red Tether also hides a surprising amount of content - initially, it presents as a rather small project, but as you keep attempting runs, more and more upgrades, ships, materials, and mechanics get unveiled. There are no permanent stat increases between attempts, and the whole game is definitely beatable with the starter ship, but there is still a ton of stuff to keep things fresh on subsequent runs (for an anecdotal example - at the time of writing, over 30 hours in, I'm still nowhere near unlocking all of the available ships - it is quite possible that I'm just bad at the game, but something tells me those numbers will be similar for most of the players). On the presentation side - the visuals are clean and beautiful, and the music is bangin, so absolutely no complaints in that department.
Essentially, if you are looking for games that aim to do one thing, and do it outstandingly well; if you enjoy mastering mechanics and feeling your skill level go up rather than just your stats; if you like playing games simply for the satisfaction the gameplay brings - Red Tether is an easy recommend.