Death Ray Manta SE

Short version: The game contains potentially [b]minutes[/b] of entertainment, which could easily be found elsewhere. Jeff Minter popularized a style of arcade shooter that hit the player with speed, bright colors, excessive particle effects, loud effects, and techno music. Death Ray Manta attempts to inject that ethos with an unhealthy dose of steroids. Death Ray Manta at is heart is a very basic twin-stick shooter. There are no options and no explanations, you simply press a button and start playing. You have one life, and your score is just the number of stages you've cleared plus any gems (one per stage?) that you collected. For extra annoyance, even though the entire game field could easily have been fit into a stationary single screen, the view is instead set close enough that the camera has to pan around, further obscuring your view of the action and potential threats. While I understand the desire devs have to include Steam Trading Cards, it seems somewhat exploitative to include them in a game that offers so little, as anyone idling for the handful of available cards will significantly skew the apparent play time of the game.

Death Ray Manta is a cool but basic twin-stick shooter. It has a lot of visual stuff happening on the screen and the music is rad, however it lacks a lot of content. The game only has 32 short levels, that get harder and harder, in the same small arena, and that’s about it. Scoring is limited by the highest level reached, plus gems collected, with 1 possible gem per level. This means the max score you can get is 64 points. No Multipliers, no combos, no clearing speed bonuses, no leaderboards, nothing. Also, there’s only one single mode. No stuff like an endless mode, different arenas, bosses, level selection, challenges, achievements, nothing. Also, there’s only a single ship without upgrades or any customization. The music is always the same as well. To me this feels like a demo to a proper game with way more content, except this is the real game, and you must pay for it. But despite the lack of content, the game is cheap, easy to pick-up and play in short bursts, and addictive in the beginning, so in the end I can recommend it. It didn’t last long, but I had fun with it.