Liquidator Demo
About
Made with Unity 5.6.5.
Liquidator is a 90's-era Descent-clone, with dated graphics and a classic DOS-themed aesthetic. The player navigates the maze-like corridors of subterranean mines, whilst unlocking doors and fending off a variety of enemies, in the process.
Similar to the original 1995 release from Parallax Software, the primary objective in Liquidator involves locating and destroying each facility's reactor and then escaping the mine before a meltdown occurs.
The Premise
As of 2068, Demeter Industries has fallen on hard financial times, due to insufficient profits reaped in the aftermath of substantial investments in a large-scale mining operation, desigjned to extract precious metals from the mantle beneath the earth's crust.
Now, the company's precarious monetary situation has left the organization open to an impending hostile takeover at the behest of a rival holding company. Logistical analysis confirms that the standard procedure of extracting personnel and implementing standard shut-down procedures will incur expenditures which the company is unable to sustain.
As a result, Demeter's head of security, Heidi Nguyen, has outsourced certain duties to a particular "freelancer" as a means of expediting a more "financially-sound alternative" to depriving the company of its monetary burdens.
Under the guise of "Operation Redline", you embark upon your duties under the code-name of "Liquidator". Your assignment to penetrate the interiors of each mine, locate and destabilize the nuclear-powered generators, and then escape through one of the many available ventilation shafts before the entire place explodes.
Due to a variety of internal circumstances, employees within these facilities have already come to expect the impending moves from Demeter's security division, and thus have taken it upon themselves to hire a few "freelancers" of their own, not to mention deploying a few standard automatons which have been reconfigured for military usage.
Gameplay
Similar to games within the Descent series, you pilot a hover craft with a host of weapons at your disposal , not to mention the ability to maneuver 360-degrees of orientation in either direction. Keys corresponding to certain colors are required to unlock particular doors, and various machinations will attempt to thwart your progress, every step of the way.
Once you have located the mine's generator, you are required to destroy it, upon which you are allocated a 30 second period to vacate the facility before a meltdown occurs.
Controls:
Retro Features:
There are variety of components within the game which have been explicitly designed to emulate the characteristics and limitations of DOS-based computer games in the 90s era, including the following:
- 320x200 resolution
- low-polygonal objects
- blocky, unfiltered textures
- low draw distances
- an old-fashioned MIDI-generated soundtrack
- pre-rendered sprites representing various items and pick-ups
- limited frame-rate
Other Remarks:
At this point, Liquidator is still within the preliminary stages of the prototype phase, and the game is still beset by a large number of bugs and innumerable components which are more than a little "rough around the edges", so to speak.
I'll be looking to update this demo on an ongoing basis, and hopefully most of the kinks will have been ironed out within a reasonable period of time.