Invicta Beam

Invicta Beam is a great-looking, very frustrating, somewhat cumbersome FPS experience. While everything you will see and hear have a sleek style to them that is undeniably impressive, the gameplay includes an annoying, unforgiving system of one-hit deaths, cluttered screens, ineffective player weapons / powerups and a host of other issues which make the game great to see and enticing to want to play more of, but very cumbersome to get through at times. The overall design of Invicta Beam strikes a great tone with colorful neon lights blazing in the distance amidst futuristic structures and great-looking enemies including spider-like mechs launching rockets which buzz around you in circles of smoke trails or boss characters such as a humongous Triceratops skeleton looming overhead with a ton of guns under its shell. This all looks awesome, and at times the combat can be a rewarding experience as you dodge their attacks while delivering your own. Unfortunately, it seems some of the enemy turrets, such as the laser enemy are bound to hit you no matter what you do, with their LOS being immediate, direct shots to the player. Other unforgiving and "cluttered" feeling moments of the game include the player waiting to progress to the next area just outside of a green laser gate. While these gates will block all of the enemies incoming shots until you decide to step through, if they have littered the gate with bullets already, you will just be standing there waiting to enter until the shots have deflected enough, giving you enough space to proceed. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1199921385 If you dare to step through a hair to the left or right of one of the yellow stacked up bullets, however, thank you for playing, Game Over, reload and run through the laser gate as soon as the game loads before the enemies have stacked up any bullets to try your hand at the arena ahead. This gives the game a challenging difficulty and an interesting skew of "having to plan ahead your next move and clear the room accordingly" that is unique when compared to other First Person Shooters, and it can be fun at times. Unfortunately, with enemies such as the aforementioned laser turrets being so incredibly accurate, and the player needing to receive little more than 2-3 hits from enemies to be killed, your own shots begin to feel very underpowered. Save for a sparse rocket pickup you occassionally find and an invaluable shield which deflects enemy bullets, the player powerups are few and far between. You dump tons of ammo into enemies hoping for them to finally keel over while your own vitality is somewhere between dry twig on the bed of a forest and fruitfly caught in a hurricane. Invicta Beam's recent (Oct 30 2017) update resolves some of these issues with the game, by allowing more of the game to be experienced, by side-stepping its prohibitive difficulty via unlocking all of its levels to everyone from the get go. Whereas in other titles I have found having all levels unlocked from the start to kill my interest in the game, I'm glad this is present in Invicta Beam, as I wanted to see more of the game somehow but found its difficulty and combat design to be taxing. While the update doesn't address these issues overall, I hope that in a future update the disparity between player damage / abilities and enemies damage / life total is balanced out a little more, to allow more of the game to be experienced. Although I think Invicta Beam can be an annoying player experience due to its difficulty and some issues with its pacing, thanks to its awesome visual design and immersive effects, I still enjoy Invicta Beam as more of a "first person experience" than fluid-functioning "First Person Shooter." I would highly recommend checking out the demo to Invicta Beam before deciding whether or not to purchase it, as it will give you a general idea of how it looks and feels, and whether its steep difficulty is something you want to bother trudging through or not.