Devastator

I love Geometry Wars and Devastator scratches the exact same itch. Runs, looks and plays great.

There's a lot here that makes Devastator a worthwhile twin-stick shooter. Enemies can mutate/reproduce if not dealt with in time. Pickups on the map are always worth chasing as they recharge your shield/power or your bomb, and that bomb recharge pickup also morphs the map into something different, giving reason to think about the risk/reward of grabbing it or not. The bombs also freeze most enemies even when they're out of reach, meaning even if you know your bomb won't connect with a troublesome enemy, maybe it's worth it anyway to give yourself some time to close the distance. It seems like grabbing the pink bomb pickup freezes certain enemies for a split second as well, giving you even more reason to plan when you should grab it. There are red variant enemies that can't be damaged by your shots. At first glance just an irritating feature, but upon figuring out you can destroy them with bombs or even by using the warp pads, they felt fair, and added to the constant decision-making and strategy-formation that was already present. It's honestly pretty impressive how many interesting mechanics are present in this game, and given that it's priced so low, I'd definitely give it a shot if you like games like Geometry Wars and other fast-paced twin-stick shooters. My ONE caveat is the problem with visual clarity. I had to tweak some settings, as the game was way too bright, had a jarring flickering effect for some things, and even still, the map can get very hard to read at a glance. My advice to the devs would be to lessen the time for the enemy destroyed animation/effect, lessen the visual flair slightly for when you make contact with an enemy without killing them, change the color of the enemy bullets since they're the same as the enemies, and give those bullets priority/foreground so they're always visible even when you destroy a bunch of enemies on top of some enemy bullets.

My first impressions video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9NcLmPuCM8 This is a game that has gotten almost no attention and that is a huge shame because if you're into score attack or twin-stick games, this is a must-own in my opinion. Radiangames makes a lot of smaller, mechanics focused titles that are just plain fun and that shines through here. Devastator has a generic name, but it's a stylish, fast twin-stick shooter that has several different modes, all of which involve taking out enemies, but with different means of progression. Score is the name of the game and this is backed up by full online leaderboards and a combo and scoring system that rewards taking risks. I didn't have too much problem beating each mode on its standard difficulty, but there are multiple to choose from and ultimately, your goal isn't just to get to the end, but to run the modes many times and improve your score each time. Practice will definitely be needed to compete on the leaderboards. For the price, this is easily one of the best twin-stick shooters since Geometry Wars. It brings the great visuals and soundtrack, but also a gameplay formula on its own that I think is a great evolution for the formula.

Average Geometry Wars clone, not as good as inferno 2. If you want it, get it in the sale. Oh and laughably, this twin stick shooter has no joypad support!

99 Cent Store Geometry Wars. I love to support indie devs and the price is right...but you're still better off playing GW: Dimensions. Just not enough game here for me

All Radiangames are great! Coming from a shmup developer who is friends with the developer. Love twin-stick shmups too. Arena-based, high polish, leaderboards, and achievements. All done well. Somehow this is the first time I am playing Devastator on Steam!

Simple, yet fun twin stick shooter with hectic action and enough game modes to keep you entertained for hours. Leaderboards included for online score competition. Recommended! (8/10)

Devastator is, as it will proudly shimmer at you on nearly every menu screen, a hard-core arcade twin-stick shooter. Radiangames does know their twin-sticks, and if they make something I pay attention to it, but this one took a bit of time to gel. I recommend approaching it warily and when you can set aside some time to sit down and properly attend to it. They have clearly tried to set the bar high and intense, and while the result is not perfect, they definitely succeeded. It's simultaneously a pure twin-stick (you shoot and you bomb, nothing else) that still feels like its own unique action mix, that's rewarding to engage skillfully, and with a design so focused on pure intensity that every minute is filled to the brim. Twin-stick fans who don't mind the brick-in-the-face action should not miss this. There's attention to visual details, but an over-enthusiasm for visual excess and a commitment to their look/colors that takes priority over the player's desire to clearly see what they want to see. Slight shifts in shape or red-orange spectrum can be life and death distinctions, and explosions are clearly higher priority than the player--or the enemy bullets. You might want certain key information displayed clearly on your character, rather than distant, unusable screen edges, but instead you get subtle visual cues, like your little turret getting brighter as your turbo charge increases, or even just nothing, as how the rest of the critical information seems to be handled. Subtleties are the name of the game here, for better or worse. You can move faster by not shooting, but not by much. You can hold your fire so when you do fire it hits harder, but not for long. Various tones of dark blue spaces are normal, but a black space is impassible, and a brighter edged space blocks movement and shots while a dim edged space does not but an orange space is hazardous to touch. And everything going on is lightning fast, without a moment to spare. You can't just look and process as you see things. You have to feel what's going on around you. It's workable, but you have to noticeably commit to the game for it to show you a good time. You can't just pick it up and go, and it will likely feel very abrupt even with lots of genre experience. You need some time to get to know it, and if you are away a while, you'll almost certainly need some time again to get going. The game offers three modes, each with its own angle on the game's narrow arcade focus. The Sectors mode is the best starting point, which is oddly the middle of the three presented modes. Cycles (third) makes a good next step from there, and Quadrants (first) offers compact, maximum intensity play. Each mode has Practice, Standard, and Elite versions, with Practice basically giving you a limited version of Standard to get your toes wet, and no scoring recorded. [b]Sectors[/b] offers short, predefined set-piece stages fought one by one in five blocks of eleven (a higher intensity bonus stage acts as capstone), with limited lives to lose, and an option to continue. You can start from the beginning of any block you've reached, and clearing a block will give you a letter rating for that set (your best is recorded on the sector list), and then continue on to the next block. Each stage has additional score awards, which basically amount to being fast and flawless. Since play continues from one block to the next, posting real high scores requires full runs through the fifty-five brief stages. [b]Cycles[/b] is straightforwardly much like Sectors, but instead of a single wave present at start, you must endure ongoing enemy spawns and threat changes to clear substantially longer versions of each stage. [b]Quadrants[/b] does not have discrete stages, but simply gives you three minutes to fight continuous semi-randomized enemy spawns, with no extra lives or continues, and an arena that changes as you grab bomb charge pickups from the four corners. Quadrants uses different scoring instead of the stage bonuses of the other modes, and ramps up [i]hard[/i] on you for that three minutes, so brace yourself for quick losses. Sectors seems the only viable starting place, and I'd say part of why it took several times coming back to connect with the game was the other modes. Sectors is about more methodical mastery, as you play to clear each stage of enemies that all enter play immediately, with a death resetting the stage for a fresh try. That's not usually my play preference, but this bite-sized presentation with clear refreshes actually helps you explore your options for various scenarios and see your mistakes develop quickly. The other modes don't really allow you a chance to reflect on what just happened or even look away, which can make connecting to the game's resources, tools, and priorities quite obstructive. Cycles builds out the stage experience to its full form, giving you a little longer-term action training to engage and try to handle. Then, Quadrants yanks the rug out from under you with its three minutes of full-on assault. You do have more to manage than is immediately obvious, and some of the game's help info is overly trite or makes sense mainly [i]after[/i] you already get what it means, so I'm going to lay out several points here in hopes of both illuminating the game and giving others a better early experience. Enemies have predefined movement patterns and effects, that you must exploit to keep up. Red enemies block your shots and sometimes return them or shoot on their own, but you can bomb them away. There's a lot of enemies to try and learn the various details, but you kind of absorb how it all works once you're processing them specifically as limited entities and feeling out more survivable holes in the fast-moving action. Sectors and Cycles use very restricted pools of in-play enemies, which helps a ton once you're looking for that. Collecting bomb energy pickups triggers a small explosion and larger enemy freeze, making grabbing them a tactically valuable action, especially with enemies as fast as they are. "Super ammo" comes from shield pickups (four charges restores your 1-hit shield), and gets spent boosting all your shots until you run out. You stack up all the super ammo you pick up, so you won't lose it by grabbing early, but rationing your pickups to feed heavier shooting windows gives you a noticeable advantage. Turbo only charges up while moving [i]and[/i] not shooting, and gets consumed as you shoot even more quickly than super ammo. Turbo use gets conserved a bit while moving and shooting the same direction. So, you need to work in as much not-shooting as you can, and preferably shoot forward if you can. Teleport squares can't immediately re-trigger, but do refresh after a short delay, and you can kill enemies by teleporting onto them, if you know the exit square (some teleport arrangements are less obvious than others). As it all comes together, you play fast and think fast, seeing the small differences between enemies and between grid spaces, shooting your way through what you can, holding fire if you can, moving if you can, collecting what you need... It doesn't encourage a flow state: you [i]start[/i] locked-in, or you try again. Sadly, there are some issues left unfixed due to stubbornness or simply the poor reception of the game, and you'll need to make peace with such things. Some glitches (some edge glows take up space and can catch you), some design errors (enemy bullet color matches enemies and explosions, without top-layer visibility), disappointingly trivial achievements (only two remotely challenge you), very limited leaderboards (top page and your page only, no friend boards at all), and so on. Still, the price is low, the sale discounts are generous, and the game is both fun and bristling with its own particular challenge, once you make the needed connections.

I got a million point score on the elite board. But there is defects and bugs that RadianGames won't fix. This prevents you from getting a million point score each time you play. That's why I can't recommend this game because it makes this game no fun for gamers to play.

Really solid game, takes a bit to learn to not play it exactly like geometry wars. Main critique is I wish the enemy types had more color variations to distinguish them.