Welcome once again to PCGamesN’s Spotlight on Greenlight, our regular Saturday feature where we look at the best and the most interesting Greenlight games that are hoping to make their way onto Steam. We’ve already looked at dozens of other titles in weeks past, so do take a look at our back catalogue.
For this week’s Spotlight I’ve chosen a game that I thought more people would’ve heard of, the sort of game that I’d hope would have reached further than it already has and yet it still remains almost unknown. That game is The Few and I think it shows a lot of potential. Strap in and fix your goggles, this is going to be an exciting Spotlight.
The Few is a strategy game based around the Battle of Britain, sliding you into the corduroy trousers of the Air Marshal responsible for the defence of the British isles, popping a pipe into your mouth for good measure. It’s the summer of 1940 and daily assault’s by Göring’s Luftwaffe are about to begin, with wave after wave of bombers set to lay waste to the nation’s industry and airfields.
The only thing that stands in the way is The Few, a multinational hodgepodge of exhausted, overworked pilots that the Royal Air Force has assembled. Already stretched to their limits, it’s your job to train, deploy and manage these pilots as hundreds of Heinkels make their way toward the British coast. You’ll do this by jumping between production management, where you’ll control the nation’s war effort, and a tactical overview, which sees you assigning squadrons to cover different parts of the country. A judicial deployment of your forces should hopefully see you intercepting most of the raids sent against you.
Your overview of a behexed Great Britain runs in pausable real-time and when enemy forces aren’t on their way, you’ll can busy yourself with pilot training and recruitment, putting bums on cockpit seats and making sure every pilot has a Hurricane or Spitfire to fly in. Once a Nazi squadron is spotted, you’ll want to send one of your own to shoot it out of the skies and as the two flights meet, the game switches to a tactical overview.
From here you’ll maneuver your planes as they weave their way into battle, directing them as they fly, switching their formations and directing them against their targets.
If you can keep your factories intact then they’ll keep providing you with replacement aircraft and can also develop other equipment that will aid in the defence of ol’ Blighty, such as anti-aircraft guns and radar towers.
The Few is the work of Polish developers BlackMoon Design and, as with quite a few other titles that are clamouring for our votes on Steam Greenlight, it doesn’t look like it started life as a PC game. Everything about The Few’s design suggests it was first conceived as something for mobile or iOS devices and that would put it in line with the rest of BlackMoon’s portfolio. Still, I see no reason to be snobby about platforms, as it looks like a lot of fun to me and while it might be a relatively lightweight strategy title, I see no reason why it couldn’t entertain PC gamers just as much as anyone else. Triple Town has settled very comfortably onto Steam and I can vouch for just how horrifically addictive that can be.
If you want to keep up to date with the development of The Few, the game doesn’t yet have an official website but it does have a Facebook page here and, in case you missed the link the first time around, this is its home on Greenlight.
Tally ho.