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Beyond the Heavens is an arcade style shoot-em-up with interesting and useful ship and weapon upgrades, nice boss fights, and some interesting settings. That being said, there are not enough to really recommend this game for everyday players, let me elaborate a little.
My biggest problem with this game is that I see too many unavoidable enemy bullets. A lot of people who play shoot-em-up games will know that traditionally this genre does not give the player too much leeway with taking damage, usually one hit kills means that careful movement is crucial. This game really makes this attempt way too difficult. I understand that there are a lot of health drops and the ship's armor is there so that I can take some damage and pick up health, but it just doesn't feel right.
This ship that you control has an evade function, giving you some invincibility frames that almost have no cooldown, and it increase the ship's movement in that direction. I understand this is built into the game, and it makes me really want to overuse and abuse the function. Of course this ends up with my ship teleporting/evading into a wall of enemy fire, ending in a crash and burn situation anyway.
The screen scroll is fairly standard pace, but most of the enemies do not move at all, it just looks too strange to me.
There are random linear explosive lines of fire threatening your ship at many points of the level, and these are avoidable by using the evade function, though I find this completely unnecessary. This basically serves as simple obstacles to avoid, and with enough tell-time, it is just something else to avoid. But it does not really add to the game except to take out parts of the screen for movement real estate from time to time. A lot of times if this is used to increase the difficulty, that's fine, but when it's done just as filler, without enemies on the screen, it seems pointless.
As I mentioned above, there are some nice things about this game:
[h1]Pros[/h1]
+Ship upgrades (better armor, etc)
+Weapon upgrades (different types and progressive leveling)
+Good boss designs and nice boss fights
+Good number of levels
[h1]Meh[/h1]
>Four different difficulty levels, allowing casual players to try to play as well (though still too many bullets)
>Music has decent selections, but does get repetitive after a while.
>Game focuses on replayability, but this does involve re-grinding earlier levels to get more credits to level up to beat the later levels.
[h1]Cons[/h1]
-Too many enemy bullets, a lot of them unavoidable (I get it, I might not be good enough.)
-Ship movement poorly balanced with bullets
-Graphics are fairly bland and plain
-Fun factor really not present too well for this game, unfortunately.
[h1]Conclusion[/h1]
Beyond the Heavens is an arcade style shoot-em-up with some good ideas but execution could be a lot better. There are nice things in the game, but they come in spurts among other fairly bland aspects of the game. The overwhelming amount of enemy bullets even in the easiest of four difficulty settings could be off-putting for the casual player, while the experienced player likely has better options to gravitate toward. Thus I cannot offer a positive recommendation for this game at this time.
[quote]I received the product for free. I did not receive any compensation to write this review. The opinions represented here are entirely my own and were not influenced in any way.[/quote]
