I received this game for free, and I'm glad I did, because I would have regretted spending money on it. When I first heard about it, I thought "Great! It's another Beat Hazard Ultra!". That was my first mistake. I really like BHU. I like other twin-stick shooters like Geometry Wars and Waves. This game is not like those games. It's true I haven't played a lot of this game, but I've played enough to see how some things work, and there's virtually nothing to motivate me to continue playing. Here are some reasons I don't like this game.
1. No instructions. Not really a big deal, you can figure it out, but it's nice when you're not forced to guess what key to press to enter a level, among other things.
2. No sound effects. This game certainly has music, but, your weapons make no sound, your enemies make no sound, nothing makes sound. There is only music when you're playing. I guess in some ways, that could be nice. Maybe you like the ambience, I don't know. I don't like that. I'm trying to play a game, and having some audio feedback would be nice.
3. Lack of contrast. By this, I mean that enemies don't stand out from the background. Or, at least, if they do, the background is cluttered with plenty of things that 'stand out' just as well as enemies. I suppose you could get used to it after awhile, but until you do, it's easy for your eyes to focus on some moving object in the background and completely miss the missile or laser or whatever that's about to hit your ship.
4. Lack of control. You can do two things in this game: move, and choose which direction to face. You have NO control over what weapon to use or when. I tend to prefer games that give me options and flexibility over how I play. Speaking of weapons, your ship constantly switches between projectiles. You could play a song several times, learn every beat and how your ship responds to every note in that particular song, and try to build your strategy around that. But I don't want to. I don't like flying around, wanting to shoot an enemy but being unable to and so I just fly around and aim at what I want to kill next, only to have somethign happen in the song that shoots two lazers at a 30 degree angle from your front, so you miss the ship you were aiming for, and then because it's a song and things change all the time, your lazers VERY quickly change to somethign else with some other attack pattern. So you can try to anticipate it, or react to it, and you can fail repeatedly. This is in opposition to the other games I like, where your weapons are pretty standard, and you choose when to use them, and if they change, it's probably very obvious what it's changing to and when it's changing so you can actually do something with it.
5. There are enemies that spawn in the middle of the map, abruptly, with no warning. It's not linked to the song that I can tell. It just happens. Combined with my 3rd point, this makes it disorienting. I'll kill an enemy, think an area is clear, refocus my attention, and suddenly I'm being surrounded and hit by enemies that are on a half of the screen that was literally clear a second ago.
6. Bad scaling. The game description advertises a fluctuation between fast-paced mayhem and calm tension depending on what the music is doing at the time. Beat Hazard Ultra does this same thing, and I think they do it quite well. When the song is fast and loud, enemies zip around the screen, but your weapons are at full power, and so it can turn into an intense, all-out battle. But then when the song slows down, BHU shuts down your weapons. They're still there, but they're very weak. To compensate, the enemies also slow down and also lose their weapons. It gets calm, and you can take a moment to breathe, but you've still gotta be careful with your flying to avoid getting backed into a corner. In Dub Wars, however, enemies move the same speed (as far as I can tell) regardless of what the song is doing. At fast/loud parts, as in every other part, your weapons are constantly switching it up so you never have a consistent way to take out enemies, and at slow/quiet parts, you just have no weapons at all. Which means it's basiclly the same game, except instead of any potential to kill things, you can only dodge.
7. Bad scaling. Generally, if a game allows you to collect stuff that you can then spend on upgrades, the game will also let you keep those upgrades. This makes sense, for reasons I won't explain. Dub Wars, however, has you collect "wub" in a song, and then when you die you can spend it on better health, or shields, or lasers, or side lasers, or whatever. Except that any upgrades you get don't carry over to the next level. So for every song, you basically start fresh and have to grind up for any upgrades you may want. Speaking of upgrades, they present you with several sliders for each thing you can upgrade. Except that the sliders don't work. I thought I'd be able to grab it and drag it up or down to choose how many points I want to allocate to a particular thing. But nope. You have to click a little plus or minus sign at the top or bottom of each slider. Once you allocate points, you can turn the upgrade off again, or just make it less, which is nifty, but it's still an unintuitive way of doing it. This is on top of the game giving you no indication of exactly how the upgrades work. So, ok, upgrading 'health' gives you more hp and upgrading one of your lazers does more damage, right? Sure, ok, fine. That's easy. But how much does it change? I have absolutely no idea. I don't know how much of a difference it makes. Also, for the 5 or so different kinds of weapons upgrades you can choose from, it wasn't readily obvious to me which is which. They have a name that you don't see anywhere else, and there's a preview image (just an image, most of which is just your ship), but it doesn't exactly look the same way it does in the song. There certainly seemed to be more types of projectiles in the game than what I could upgrade, and since they're so dependent on what is happening in the song and may only actually be in use for half a second at a time, upgrading any one of the weapons seemed pretty silly. To add to the confusion for new players, each type of projectile seems to get reskinned for each song, just to keep you on your toes.
There was probably more, but, I don't know what anymore. I guess it would have been nice to have the option of playing my own music if I wanted to.
I will say that it's not ENTIRELY bad. I didn't get very far, so I don't know what all it has to offer, but some of the music is decent. Obviously this depends entirely on your personal tastes, but it's pretty clearly dubstep, and you probably wouldn't be checking it out if you didn't enjoy that genre. Also, the game is sort of pretty. Sort of. I personally don't really like the enemy design and such, but, I like flashing neon and stuff. Light shows are pretty cool. This game doesn't provide the best visuals, but it was one of my favorite parts of the game.
In short, I just feel like this game could use a lot of polishing in a lot of areas. I have no idea what the actual development process was, but it gives me the impression that there were some ideas that were thrown together somewhat quickly, and not much attention was paid to how the parts actually work to provide a user experience. If some areas were adjusted, this game might be quite good. Reading some of the other reviews, it sounds like it's gone through a handful of updates already which changed the user experience rather drastically, so there is some hope. But as it stands, I am unimpressed.
