Note: This review is going to look a lot like my review for the game, Nova Wing. This is because the developer copy + pasted Nova Wing, and changed the name to "Nova Wing II". Why get paid once for garbage on Steam when you can get paid twice for the same trash? Asset flipping begins at home!
Anyway, given the developer has copy + pasted their entire game, there's no grounds for complaining about a copy + pasted review... all the defects are the same. The only difference I could see was the scrolling direction changed, but that has no impact on gameplay, which is identical.
Nova Wing II is yet another of literally hundreds of lazy amateur 2D retro top-down shooters infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This arcade shmup eschews the usual crap pixel "art" for some static sprites that, frankly, aren't all that much better.
It's a sci-fi themed vertical scrolling "twin stick" style shooter with enemy waves similar to arcade shoot 'em ups like Galaga. Weirdly the enemies have huge TTK, your ship weapons are like peashooters, and the control handling bites, so this is a huge pile of non-fun if you actually try to play it. Although almost nobody has... see below for the embarrassingly low player counts.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The game features somewhat lazy, simplistic 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.
The controls and game handling are notably very floaty and imprecise. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing or polish done.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the video game library/engine, SDL2 (SimpleDirect Media Library). It's rarely used, because it's arguably worse than construction kits like GameMaker Studio, RPGMaker and Clickteam Fusion, but it's also much harder to work with. Despite this, SDL2 (SimpleDirect Media Library) has very limited capabilities, which go some way to explaining the poor quality of the game. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Nova Wing II is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.
