To say that Fatal Stormer is inspired by the DOS game Star Gunner would be an understatement, as it often takes design cues directly from that game, which is not a bad thing, since Star Gunner was and still is an excellent side-scrolling Shoot 'Em Up. Examples of these design cues are: the way enemies move into the field and the level design, the asteroid rain on the second level, the shop between levels, the gems that you have to collect for money, etc etc.
At the time of writing I've played the first two levels on normal difficulty, and I intend to play more (I will update this review as I go).
Let start with the good stuff:
+ Excellent visuals, not only because the game is quite pretty, but also because the fidelity is great, I've had 0 issues with visibility so far. Also like the visuals for the gems you have to pick up, and most of the weapon effects look pretty good too. The explosions could be better though, right now they look too much like overlayed sprites.
+ Large variation in encounters and enemy behaviour, really great for the gameplay, as you always have to be on your toes for something new. I've seen enemies coming from behind, from the background, shooting beams at an angle, shooting bullets, crawling over the floor, coming out of tubes, coming onto the screen in different formations, or flying randomly, it's good stuff!
+ The background is alive, often you even see enemies flying in from the background, this is a nice innovation over something like Star Gunner, Fatal Stormer takes great advantage of its 3D nature.
+ There's a shop, similar as it is in Star Gunner, except here it's a bit clearer what you can put on your ship per slot. The upgrades seem quite fun and varied, though I haven't tried too many of them yet. You can change your engine, armor and super weapon, and you have two slots for orbiting bots, two for side-weapons and one for a primary weapon.
+ The bosses are not trivial, they have several different attacks, and they are definitely not easy. They are on the tanky side though, which might be frustrating in the earlier levels.
Now the not so good stuff:
- The presentation, UI and stuff around it feel extremely unpolished. The UI font clashes very hard with the game's cool futuristic space setting, and the buttons all look rather ugly. The UI menu visuals looks bland and uninspired. There are spelling errors all over the place, and the presentation in the shop menu is a bit lacking as well. In the option menu drop-down menus tend to hang. Some weapons statistics such as accuracy seem to be totally unclear in what they are supposed to represent, as randomly spreading weapons seem to have a higher accuracy than a laser that shoots as straight as possible (???). The weapon/item descriptions are really low-effort, a better attempt at providing some lore here would've been nice. The ingame UI is minimalistic, there could've at least been labels for the 3 meters that display health/shield/super-weapon. Everything is also rather small, some scaling option would've been nice. The boss meters in-game are glitchy/buggy, constantly shifting back and forth. The in-game font for the text that appears when you pick up stuff is really ugly, it clashes with the cool visuals. Transitions are often jarring, e.g. nothing feels dramatic about dying. All in all, it's quite hard to get immersed with these problems being present.
- The music is quite forgettable and boring, I'd go so far and turn the music off and instead play Star Gunner's soundtrack over the gameplay. The sounds seem to do the job, and were nice in certain cases, though I don't feel a lot of punch when firing my own weapons, maybe this is because I didn't get the bigger guns yet.
- There are some pacing issues. The levels are very long for instance, and without any lives, it is quite frustrating to die late in the level. It is also very easy to die late in the level, since the bosses at the end are extremely tanky. There are also some segments in the game that simply last too long, such as the asteroid rain at the beginning of level 2. This makes it frustrating to start over, when you die at the boss there. I did see some sort of checkpoint system, but I could not used it when I died at the level 2 boss.
- While enemy variety is great, that's all there is. The level design is nice, but rarely seems to pose a challenge (e.g. bariers that you have to fly around, maybe they come later? The damage from hitting terrain seems negligible), and the lack of interesting powerups makes things a bit bland. Powerups sometimes drop, but mostly either speed you up or charge your shield. There don't seem to be big credit bonuses or other cool things, and they only drop from enemies, so you can't blow up the environment to find secret powerups, or find them by hovering over specific places, which was a very fun mechanic in Star Gunner for instance (not to say that it should necessarily be present here, but it did spice up the gameplay a bit). Actually, having to blow up certain structures and things to make powerups pop out could be a nice mechanic that works well here.
- Repetitive enemy models so far. It seems that certain models have very distinct behaviors. It would be nice if these had a somewhat different look, to signal this better. It could be as simple as a different color, or a slightly different model.
- The mouse control is horrid and unusable in its current form. It feels like I'm dragging a brick around on ice with a long rope. Keyboard control works fine though.
In my opinion, the things the game does right, it does extremely well, and most of things that it does wrong are fixable or can at least be improved to the point where they no longer pose an issue. This is one of the closest attempts I've seen so far at making something that resembles Star Gunner, and I really like what I've seen so far. Looking forward to playing more soon.
