One day, during the times of truly crazy Steam sales, I bought no less than 20 games for less than $80, and I just so happened to grab this one for $2.50 as part of that purchase. Of course, I then proceeded to completely forget about it and not play it, until stumbling across it in my library once again over a decade later.
So, has this game aged well? Honestly, no, not at all. It tries to make a unique spin on the twin-stick shooter formula by making it so your ship has no weapon at all by default. You need to absorb ions from the clouds floating around the rather annoyingly cramped arenas and then launch it out again to attack enemies.
If this sounds kinda awkward and not fun, well, you'd be exactly right, quite frankly. It has two control schemes- keyboard+mouse (KB+M) and gamepad, and honestly neither one feels particularly good. Constantly holding down the left mouse button with KB+M gets rather tiresome fast. This frustration definitely applies to needing to hold the left shoulder trigger constantly while using a gamepad as well.
The game also has pretty mediocre gamepad support, forcing you to use KB+M in menus and then it only works during gameplay. It also does a bad job explaining the controls in both the tutorial and the nigh-useless "config" page. Yes, it's one of THOSE games, developed in that annoying early 2010s era that basically just EXPECTED you'd use an Xbox 360 controller on PC with whatever bad/good default configuration they give you, and no convenient way to remap anything. Granted, this game did come out in 2011, more than 3 years before the PS4 would start to help loosen Microsoft's dominance on the PC game controller market, but still, other controllers existed back then, too!
Moving to the gameplay itself, "irritating" and "underwhelming" probably describe it best for me. Everything stems from the janky controls I've spent entirely too much time ranting about already, and the shot you fire after gathering plasma has ZERO spread to it. If your shots don't hit enemies directly HEAD ON, a task far easier said than done, thanks to the controls, they'll most likely just glide right past your intended targets harmlessly. The game does have power-ups and some interesting scoring mechanics on its surface. Unfortunately, neither of these do much in particular to offset the annoying gameplay and aggravating controls.
The power-ups seem exciting but more often than not, they don't seem to really do anything? Plasma Torus forms a ring of plasma around you that seems like it should ostensibly kill enemies and blow up asteroids, but in practice, it seems to just... gently caress(?) them while doing little to no damage, apparently. Meanwhile, the Seeking Drone item seems decently useful, but that one appears quite rarely.
Not much worth noting about the graphics and sound. With all the particles flying everywhere all the time, I found it difficult to keep track of my ship, a considerable flaw for a twin-stick shooter. They look alright for a budget title from this time period. I do not remember anything about the music except finding it repetitive and annoying while playing.
In all honesty, I'd have a hard time recommending this game for $2.50, let alone its full price of $10, even when it originally released in 2011. Now? Nope, no way. Not unless you get it for free, honestly.
