As it turns out, the death of my pixel takes 56.61 +/- 22.87 seconds (mean +/- SD) on average. Not so good, I guess.
This game will really strain your ability to pay attention to a lot of stuff at once. You’ve got the walls closing in around you. Things popping up everywhere and flying at you from all sides. Laser beams zapping across the screen. Powerups always appearing in what seems like the most inconvenient place possible. Focus on just one of those things for a little too long and it’s over.
I never even made it to some of the later enemies, so apparently it can get even worse.
Part of the problem is that the whole thing feels a little more luck-based than you’d like. Maybe I’m just making excuses for myself; but let me give you an example:
It always starts out the same. This spinning cross comes flying at you, and then a little rotating box appears somewhere and starts spawning enemies if you don’t shoot it in one particular spot fast enough. Whether you can do this depends on where the vulnerable side happens to be with respect to your ship; and since you’re at your weakest in the beginning, it’s easy for things to get out of hand quickly if you can’t put a lid on the enemy spawns right away. Hence the high standard deviation you see above.
Beyond that, the powerups and abilities are randomized. Some are definitely more important than others and the whole game can hinge on whether or not you happen to get the thing that can stop the walls from shrinking when you need it.
(UPDATE: As of version 1.1, the rotating boxes have been toned down a bit with regard to the impact of their initial orientation. Also, apparently the powerup drops are tied to certain enemy types, as the instructions now make more clear. Still, it's so chaotic and you have so little room to work with most of the time that you don't usually have the luxury to pick and choose what you're shooting.)
That’s fine in some ways. It’s an arcade shooter after all, so you’d expect more of a throw-away, live-in-the-moment experience than you would from a progression-oriented game. You’re not supposed to stress too much about every individual run not going according to plan. Keep playing and you’ll get better overall, and then at some point the stars will align and you’ll pull off a magical run that nets you a good survival time.
They probably wanted to force you to be more flexible and adapt to different circumstances rather than just follow the same optimized strategy every time. It would be nice, though, if there were a few more handholds on which your burgeoning skills could find purchase. There’s not much “oomph!” to the various powers, and so you never get the sense that your ship is really getting stronger to keep pace with the increasing challenge. You sort of spend the whole game on your back foot or flat-out running for your life, which can be a little unsatisfying.
You may see the pictures and conclude that it doesn’t look like much, but it sort of grew on me to the point where I was having some fun. It does generate exciting moments from time to time when you can zip through a whole crowd of enemies, grab a powerup and turn the tables on them. There needed to be more ways to create dynamic swings like that and give yourself some breathing room, because without them the frenetic action turns into a bit of a blur.
I did play long enough to make it onto the leaderboard, only to discover that in the end they rob you of the full arcade experience and you can’t enter your name as “♥♥♥” or “POO” or even “AAA” like the good old days. So much for video games advancing over the years.
You can find more indie game reviews at [url=https://oddlittlegames.com] oddlittlegames.com [/url] or visit my [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/34514756/] curator page. [/url] Thanks, and enjoy!
