BitMaster

Little appeal. The gameplay is confusing - you take damage but it's not clear why, your rate of fire is wildly inconsistent, and the awkward view results in off-screen firefights. There's no guide you can glance at while paused to tell you what the changing HUD icons mean. The map all looks the same, so you glance at the minimap to orient yourself, but your character is represented by a circle, which is the same as the upgrade markers, and a marker representing the middle of the map. There's no movement friction, so you're always clumsily sliding around in some direction. You use the cursor to aim, but the aiming point is not aligned well with the cursor, which is made more frustrating when opponents dodge your shots. The difficulty is artificial as there's swarms of enemies that fire tons of projectiles, while the visuals get wacky. Some projectiles you can destroy, some you can't, and the difference isn't clear. Enemies can spawn on you, and I think they're supposed to come after you, but they get stuck on the map. Your hitbox is massive. There's only one Arena as far as I can tell, and it's not exactly a stimulating one. The achievements don't work (despite the developer saying [i]"They are not broken."[/i]) There's no highscore system or storyline. The game feels like it wasn't finished, which isn't a surprise considering that the concept has obvious flaws - it's not fun exchanging shots with NPCs off the screen. The game goes on and on, just for you to get to a boss that might relentlessly blast you with projectiles you can't destroy or dodge, and you lose a souring amount of progress when you die. Bitmaster compares poorly even to the futuristic arena games of the 90's. It left me wishing I was playing the 1996 classic [i]DeathDrome[/i] instead, which had more exciting combat and a better theme (set in 2057 where convicts fight eachother in an arena). It's also dwarfed by the 1998 epic [i]Future Cop: LAPD[/i] (set in 2098 and did the top-down 3D fighting with far more depth in both a campaign and a progressing arena mode). For a 430 MB game you don't really get much from it.