Akka Arrh

👍

So I got this game on sale for a modest five bucks, and I'm going to be honest, with the quality this game is at, that should be the default price. Don't get me wrong, it's not [i]the worst[/i] game I've played, but there are several little "quirks" (if you can call them that). First off, there's no guide on what controls to use at first, and the controls you're supposed to use aren't particularly intuitive. You aim with arrow keys, not WASD or mouse. This eliminates the possibility of playing on one hand, which seems quite silly considering you only have directional keys and two abilities (not counting the standard bullet mode). Though, giving this game the benefit of the doubt, it [i]is[/i] trying to emulate that "arcade vibe," so using one hand to move and one to press that big ole space bar does seem like an intentional decision. However, what [b]doesn't[/b] seem like an intentional decision is the aforementioned [i]second[/i] ability. When an enemy "attacks" your tower, it doesn't actually immediately do damage to your health. Instead, it goes to a lower layer that you need to go down to in order to defeat the enemy before it drains your health. Here's the kicker, if you play on keyboard, the glyph is just straight-up incorrect in the tutorial that teaches you this ability. It says it's mapped to "R2," which would be the right trigger on a controller. Naturally, I thought it wanted me to swap to my mouse to press right click on there. No luck there. Instead, what it's [i]actually[/i] mapped to is the "page up" button next to the arrow keys. Going down to the lower layer is also just straight-up not fun in my opinion. I feel like I'm putting a pause on the actually [b]fun[/b] part of the game to do a micromanagement sim. If you're gonna go retro, go proper retro. Give me low HP that drains normally, make me feel like the stakes are high. The final issue I had may be more of a problem with my system, but every now and then, the graphics would just completely freak out. I have attached the specs to this review to show that I am running on a laptop with a pretty dang good graphics card. There are so many games of this type that are much cheaper as their [b]base[/b] price, are made by independent developers, and function correctly. Mycocosm is $4, Nodebuster is $3, Nebulock is $3, the list goes on. The only reason you'd purchase this game is for polish, but that seems to be nonexistent.