NOTE: This game was given to me by the developer for review purposes. This did not influence my review in any way.
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---------------------------------------OVERVIEW-------------------------------------
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Glow is a 3D shoot-em-up featuring a firefly as the protagonist.
The game is all about the action; there's no story to speak of, although the in-game text includes some tongue-in-cheek scientific firefly lore. You play a firefly with access to a deadly arsenal of glow-based weaponry, intent on dealing death to thousands of spiders ... and a few slugs.
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Graphics - Glow's graphics are somewhat mixed. The firefly and enemy models are relatively simple, with the firefly and its reinforcements seeming particularly lacklustre, but the terrain and level graphics are very pretty, and the lighting and special effects are excellent.
The game moves very quickly, so you only really have time to admire the graphics when watching someone else play, or on the levels when you have to spend a bit of time mopping up stragglers at the end.
There's a small collection of graphics options, including the normal resolution and windowed/full screen, as well as vsync, and various detail options. I experienced no slowdown in 1920x1080 with max settings on a new gaming laptop with a GTX 1070 video card.
Sound - Sound effects are acceptable, but nothing too remarkable. Music is forgettable and even occasionally annoying. I'm not sure if it's only one track or a handful of them that all sound very similar, but after the first quarter of an hour I turned off the sound and didn't miss it at all.
Gameplay - Glow is a fast third-person 3D shooter played from above and behind the firefly, which is the game's protagonist. The core gameplay involves moving around a relatively small outdoor level, blasting spiders and slugs with three different types of weapons at once, and collecting powerups to try to stay alive.
I played for about two-and-a-half hours and unlocked 11 of 19 achievements, and only saw three levels -- meadow, mountain path, and canyon -- and a handful of different enemy types: maybe five types of spiders and a single type of slug. There may be more arenas and enemy types down the track, but unfortunately this lack of variation makes Glow get repetitive fairly quickly. After not discovering any more enemy types or arenas in my last hour of play, I assume I've seen all of them.
Where Glow excels, though, other than the excellent weapon graphics, is in the number of weapons available. For any encounter you can equip your firefly with a light weapon, a heavy weapon, an ordnance (think 'bomb'), and a passive ability. You begin the game with only a single light weapon, but as you play you quickly unlock more of each type, and I found myself wanting to keep playing through another couple of levels just to see what the next unlock would bring. I can only assume that's the developers' intent.
The game includes 'partial controller support', according to the Steam page, but I only used mouse and keyboard: WASD to move, with mouse to control the crosshairs and shoot the various weapons. Unfortunately there's no controller customisation, and mouse sensitivity is set quite low.
Glow lacks some polish in some areas, too. For example, there's poor grammar and other mistakes in the in-game text, no control customisation, occasional crashes to desktop, no map or indication of where enemies are (leaving you hunting around at the end of some levels for that one lonely spider), no sound on the title screen, a sad smiley when the firefly dies, and the user interface in the menus feels a bit underdeveloped. But it all basically works, and the graphics really do look great in the heat of the action.
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Pros:
+ Excellent dynamic lighting and weapon effects
+ It's a nice idea for a shooter
Cons:
- Very repetitive: levels, enemies, gameplay, music
- Lacks polish
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If Glow cost any more than its current retail price, I wouldn't recommend it. It's a great demo, but there's not enough here to warrant paying more than a few dollars. Levels and enemy types are limited, and the game really has only one gimmick going for it: a lot of weapons to unlock with mostly very pretty special effects.
But it's fun for a few hours, in spite of its faults.
[h1]6/10[/h1]
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