Imagination Port has released new gameplay footage for Encave, an upcoming indie game that combines first-person shooting with tower defense. The Oct. 30 trailer focuses on a system that allows enemies to destroy player-built walls, damage defensive structures and create new routes through the facility.
Players begin each wave by arranging the battlefield. The trailer shows turrets, traps, mines, walls and barricades being used to guide incoming creatures toward designated areas. Once the attack begins, those structures are no longer permanent parts of the level: enemies can breach them and move through the openings they create.
A defense plan that can be erased
That changes the usual rhythm of the FPS-tower-defense format. In games built around fixed paths, players generally use the preparation phase to optimize where enemies will travel and where defenses will fire. In Encave, the layout can change during the wave, requiring players to respond to damage rather than follow one plan from beginning to end.
The footage also depicts enemies recalculating their movement after parts of the facility are destroyed. This process, known as dynamic navigation-mesh updating, allows the creatures to recognize newly available paths instead of continuing to follow a route created before the wave started. The trailer shows the resulting loop as a sequence of building defenses, surviving breaches and adapting to the altered geometry.
- Players can place turrets, traps, mines, walls and barricades before a wave.
- Creatures can break through defensive structures and open new routes.
- The game’s navigation system recalculates paths after the environment changes.
Steam listing has no release date
Encave is listed on Steam, but its release date has not been announced. Imagination Port’s trailer provides the clearest public look so far at the game’s facility-building and combat systems, including the interaction between destructible geometry and enemy navigation.
The approach builds on a format associated with games such as Sanctum, which helped establish the first-person tower-defense hybrid in 2011, and Sanctum 2. Other examples cited in connection with the format include Outpost: Infinity Siege. Those games use defensive layouts as the foundation for their waves, while Encave makes the destruction of those layouts part of the central challenge.
Imagination Port has not announced a launch date for the game. The studio’s latest trailer instead concentrates on how players prepare a defensive position and how the creatures respond when that position is breached.
