Interstellar Marines is a first person shooter that’s being released incrementally as chapters, each containing a little chunk of content. The first chapter served as a tech demo showing off a space ship environment, while the two most recent chapters, “Bullseye” and “Running Man”, the former a shooting gallery and the latter a training course with mannequin bots, have actual gameplay. The games are more graphically intensive than you might expect from something that runs through a plugin in your browser. The graphics are at least on par with any last generation first person shooter. There are some drawbacks to the plugin model: every time you want to play the game, it seems you have to download all of the content again, which results in slightly excessive five to fifteen minute waiting times on my fairly slow DSL connection.

As for the games themselves, they’re not bad. The “Bullseye” chapter is my favorite of the two. It’s simple enough, familiar to anyone that’s every played on of those light gun games at an arcade. You have a sub-machine gun, hit all the enemy targets, don’t shoot the civilians. And very satisfying, if a little repetitive. The gun sounds and feels like it packs a punch, and the targets disintegrate into impressive sprays of shredded paper. Hits are registered with a slick display that shows the points earned and exact point of impact on the targets. It was entertaining for at least thirty minutes, probably more if you played it a few minutes at a time. There are upgrades to your gun and your reload speed and accuracy improve as you earn more points, while the difficulty of the challenges ramps up as well.

The “Running Man” game is less satisfying. You run through a bland series of training rooms with crates where faceless robots run directly towards you while you try to destroy them, while some mediocre voice acting encouraging you along the way. Combat against an AI that runs straight towards you isn’t all that challenging or interesting, so it suffers a bit from that. The level and setting feels a bit generic and bland. I understand that it’s a training facility, but it doesn’t feel like a real place. There’s not a spot of dust or grime, and no bullet holes or damage from the waves of recruits that have passed before. The download time also ran longer, so I got less value out of my time. The free part was also very short. Despite all that, it’s still an impressive showing from an independent developer, and the novelty of being able to play in the browser makes it worth a try.

The developer, Zero Point Software, is using what they call a AAA indie model, where you can support them at different levels, ranging from five dollars to just unlock more “Running Man” levels to $39 for the entire planned trilogy of Interstellar Marines games when they come out. The promised feature set is impressive: dynamic open world, co-op, persistent character development, and more. I’m very interested to see where this goes. It seems to be a very promising start, and progress and updates seem steady enough – the “Running Man” chapter came out this July 2nd. Hopefully this model works out for Zero Point and they’re able to keep cranking out chapters.

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