Jetpack Kiwi

very neat little side scroller game! would recommend

This game is adorable and pretty funny. The explosion sounds for not only the enemies but also yourself make me laugh everytime! This game features an arcade mode, which pits you against the stages with a fixed amount of lives and a story mode where you can buy extra lives and skins in a shop and select whichever stage you want to tackle next. I found the game to be generally skewed on the easy side... that is until I made it to the final level, The Factory, where mobs explode in all cardinal directions, littering the screen with all of the death. It's manageable if you are fully powered up and stick toward the front top of the screen so your diagonal shots kill most things before they even become a threat, but if you lose a certain amount of lives and revert back to level 1 in all missile types, it's a spooky game of dodging everything and the kitchen sink. An odd thing that would happen more often than not was the dev window would pop up everytime I took a screen shot. It got to the point that I just placed my mouse around where the screen would pop up and just click it off each time. The music was fitting for each of the stages (I hope the devs uploaded the soundtrack somewhere. It's pretty nice! Wouldn't mind listening to it while at work!), and each stage introduced new reskins of certain enemy types. There are two notable enemy types that I would recommend watching out for. It'd be a good idea to hold your fire if you're at a low level when the dot-eyed orb mobs are all over the screen. These guys are the ones that detonate on death but are otherwise harmless. They are great for score farming once you get your bearings, and in later levels they sometimes like to hide at the very top or bottom edges of the screen to catch you off guard if you're shooting wildly. The other enemy type are these carrot creatures that like to melee charge you and then whip back around. Their upgraded forms shoot at you while doing this and the final form detonates on death. It's pretty rude! If you like classic bullet hell shooters, you could do far worse than to play this little experiment of a game especially if it is on sale. I bought it during one of the summer sales for $2 and just barely got around to playing it. It's definitely worth a casual playthrough if you need to kill some time. I want to eventually unlock some more of the skins and try out the coop mode! I can imagine it being just as funny if not more so than the single player experience.