Atomanta

GAMEPLAY Atomanta sees you blasting your way thru several stages full of enemies and giant bosses. You start by choosing 1 of 3 weapon options, a Standard front-shot, a wider incarnation, and one that doesn't hit quite as far-reaching or wide, but packs a mean punch. Each choice includes 3 separate firing styles that change the firing direction - sometimes launching out all around or behind you with a slightly weaker bullet, creating a charged, focused sniper strike - or even spinning around the player in a wheel of death! These core weapons will become more powerful as you make your way further into the game, but additional Hidden Weapons can also be found in the many secret hiding places you'll uncover while blasting every wall in sight. Enemies are fairly varied themselves, and their attacks get ever-crazier the more you play. Picking up on their unique patterns is key to avoiding hits - and it's aided by fantastic visibility and contrast between the various bullet colors on screen, and the background elements. Bosses are a treat as well - big bulky things with multiple waves of attack as your continued pressure makes them more desperate. Like many similar titles, the game can at times have dozens of brightly colored patterns swarming the screen and it becomes easier to read as you practice. Finally, aiding your quest are helpful pickups like single-hit shields, screen-clearing bombs, and 1-UPs. If you can manage to get thru the game at a high enough play, an even harder difficulty option is hidden underneath - but for someone with little or no experience, plenty of practice and resourceful item pickups help give you a fighting chance even if your struggling with a particular foe. VISUALS Stunning and full of life - the enemies, bosses, and backgrounds have a real sense of organic movement. In an style that reminds me (fondly) of PC games from the mid-late 90s and the pre-rendered 3D graphics direction made famous by games like Donkey Kong Country on the SNES, but now in beautiful HD. Stages feature fire, snow, mechanical, alien, and what could only be described as a crystal cavern (my personal favorite!) of environments. SOUND Aside from the punchy and squishy sound design for bullets and enemies, the soundtrack (composed by the developer!) absolutely nails the energetic and sometimes dark synthwave vibe permeating every stage of the game - wrapping the entire adventure into an experience reminiscent of other action-packed shmups of the late 80s to mid 90s. Overall, even for someone with little experience in this genre - it's a game that's easy to pick-up and play and while it can take some practice to improve your survival and high scores - there are several fun and challenging extra features for those with a more experienced hand to jam to. Love it. <3

The Normal mode is boring and feels overstaying its welcome too often in its stage design. I recommend to play Hard mode directly instead. The Hard mode is tighter and less repetitive. Though aside of some random counter explosions and minor pattern buffs, the Hard mode difference is not that apparent. And it's still pretty easy with lots of extends and starting lives. It's not great, but it's good. For a 50 minute per run shmup, it's well made enough. The game is also stable. The scoring system needed more depth and clearer ways to tell how to trigger the bonuses. What is Perfect Clear and does it even give me score bonus?

shut up and buy it

Really good shmup. The gameplay itself stays true to the basics of the genre, which is not a bad thing at all- it's a tried and true formula. The stages have lots of secrets to uncover, and are pretty visually varied, each ending in a multi-phase boss fight. The ships feel nice to move, the soundtrack is great, and the game, at least on normal, is pretty generous with resources. Well worth the £9.

many colors! i die a lot. very fun. good game.

An awesome space shoot 'em up with kick-ass synth-style music. There are some cool secret weapons you can find in the levels that can help you massively or make you wish you never picked them up. The game can be quite challenging in some levels, but it's also very generous in giving you extra lives and other items, which makes the game less stressful for new players something I really appreciated. If you're into shoot 'em up games, I highly recommend giving this game a try!

Gameplay is very polished with interesting pattens and loads of variety with the enemies. Graphically the game is awesome too, taking a lot from the likes of Rytpe. Grab this now.

现在修了bug后很不错了，不过子弹对比度和图层优先级都可以再优化调整下，有时候太瞎眼了，然后就是内容少了些了。。

VERY nice shmup.

Atomanta is a well designed shmup that plays halfway between the traditional 8-bit arcade shmup and the bullet hell, and the mix works very well, at least it did for me who is more an oldschool shmup player, more into R-type than the new stuff. They tried to bring their own answers to the obsolescence of the traditional shmup gameplay paradigm, with some QoL ameliorations and original gameplay choices. For example you don't lose your weaponry on death. You have 21 lives (on the standard difficulty) and one continue with 6 lives. This would seem to make the game more on the easy side, and it does seem to be rather easier then usual, but there is a higher difficulty, that I didn't try yet. The game is very smooth and fluid and pleasant to play, the levels structure reminded me of Aleste on the Sega consoles. There's a lot of little secrets to discover, including secret levels. You have an initial choice of three different weapons, but you can discover different weapon types inside the levels, there seems to be more than half a dozen. Each weapon has three different fire modes that sometimes feel like different weapons in themselves (standard, back shot, and concentrate beam). The enemies and bosses patterns are very well done, professional quality. The game manages to make you feel that your skills are your greatest asset and it's always very [spoiler]fun[/spoiler]. The graphics look very nice with a nice arcade feel of old rugged tech that evokes ancient arcade graphics , very pleasant to the eyes. Especially the colors are very harmonious and soothing, which is something that too many modern shmup devs forget about The music is nice, not transcendental, but it won't make you want to mute the game and you can play with the original music without any problems. The only technical problem I found is that some weapons seem to give a strong hit to the framerate, even on my rather powerful machine, which could probably have been prevented easily with good coding practices, but nothing too serious. I'll be following this developer in the future [h1](follow my curator page [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/33882793/]GenXPlayers[/url] for more retro and indie reviews)[/h1]