R-COIL

A fun Asteroids clone where the game's 1 button control is both its unique aspect and the maddening challenge that sets it apart from the others.

I had to pick this up, as I was a huge fan of the original arcade cabinet. At the time (around 1980) I was also a member of the 100000 club. The big hype around the machine when it rolled into our local arcade was the graphics. It used the exact same vector screen that Asteroids used, but it came with an additional tech called PRISM (Photon Refractive Index Signal Modulation) to give it the vivid color scheme. This was basically a layer of sliding sheets on top of the vector display that featured small line grids, similar to how Polaroid glasses work. The color was great, but the extra layers of glass had the downside that it produced the blur effect that this adaptation manages to recreate so well. Another downside was the cost of the PRISM display. Only 150 of these cabinets were manufactured as a result, and they are near impossible to track down these days. This is a very faithful adaptation of the original and I'd say it's a bit easier to play with a gamepad. The cabinet used a 2-1/4 inch trackball - not easy to aim with one of those! Other improvements over the original is the ability to customise your ship and the co-op expanded from 2 to 8 players. The high score chart allows for longer names too, which is a nice improvement of the 3 character limit of the original. Oh, and some additional new game modes. Anyhoo, good memories and I'm determined to get back into the 100000s.

Didn't cut it for me, I think the one button control scheme is awful

By now you know about R-COIL's gimmick: It's a very hard Asteroids clone where firing and thrust is the same button. Only it's not really Asteroids, and it's not the Dark Souls of Asteroids either. First off, the asteroids hardly matter. They increase your score a little, but more often than not you're happy that they're there so you can hide behind them. Secondly luck is too much of a factor here for this to be Dark Astersouls. One thing that's hard to achieve is precision, and that makes some enemies a lot more annoying than others. Snaking between two shots in a 20-shot arc of fire can be hard even in scrolling shoot 'em ups where you have precise control over your X and Y position, but here it sometimes simply comes down to luck. Did you fire one more shot than planned, shifting your trajectory a bit too much? Or is your shield rotated with the opening right into incoming fire? Tough luck. Luck is also a component with the powerups. In some scenes you'd really love to have a spread shot or laser to take out the half dozen bee-like green things that circle you and shoot from all angles, but all you have is your basic pew-pew gun and those bastards are extremely hard to hit with that. Due to the randomness of the upgrades it sometimes feels unfair to lose a life when you're almost through the level and simply didn't stumble upon the right powerup in time. The level 2 boss that sports a "castle" upgrade (a ring of shields circling around him) is very easy to take out with a spread shot, but a huge risk with your pea shooter. The levels themselves at least repeat the same patterns, so there is some sequence for you to learn so you can make the best out of the powerups you have. The excellent news is that games are short overall. Unlike long-winded roguelikes, it feels like you can be through the entire game in under 10 minutes. After that it becomes a high-score chaser, and that's where a game like this is right at home. That being said, I'm so far only up to level 3, and certainly nowhere near the 10 minute mark per game. Level 3 is a cursed pandemonium of screaming death that should be illegal under some sort of cruelty law. No one has completed it yet, more than a month after release, so get cracking and try. If you can deal with the fact that luck and randomness plays a bigger part here than might be obvious from the screenshots, and if you always wanted to know what it feels like to play your Vectrex while on LSD, this is the right game for you. I couldn't test the co-op or duel features (no friends, see), but I imagine they could be a good fit to the already chaotic nature of the game. I have just one technical niggle. Even with a good analog controller like a DS4 or Xbox One model, I feel like the ship's rotation could be a bit more precise. Sometimes I'd like to fire a bullet at just such an angle, but the controller seems too coarse to rotate to that spot. That makes some of the smaller enemies (e.g. the green ball that tries to orbit you) too hard to hit. But maybe today's controllers don't have such a high resolution and it just can't be done.

I bought this game because it looked like a modern Comet Busters and is available to play with my Steam Controller on my SteamOS Steam Machine and can do 4 player co-op. I the style of the game is pretty awesome, vector based objects and hitting those core mechanics right. I am new to the knockback on fire mechanic but I can see how it could be really fun with more people, I think I just suck at it. Some of the text on first boot is obnoxious but it seems to go away after first run. It was very difficult to figure out how to play on keyboard, I feel like the controls and menus could be improved to get out of my way a little more. Overall I would mark this a 4 out of 5 with some room for improvement in the menu and controls. It certainly fills a niche and takes a seat in my library as a cool core game I can chill out and play with friends on mr 4 controllers. Absolutely reccomend to people who like this genre.

For a few rounds in R-COIL, you're going to need to figure out the sensitivity, both in terms of rotation, and acceleration. Once you have, you're left with an interesting game space. Sometimes when you want to flee, the best thing to do is fire your weapon aimlessly as fast as possible. As death is frequent and cheap, I spent more time laughing at the chaos, than cursing at the controls. And while I understand that they are a stylistic choice, I personally disabled the majority of the graphical options for better visual clarity on the game.

Los controles son pésimos

Really clever neo-arcade game. It's an arena shmup with momentum-based movement like Asteroids, but with the added twist that shooting and thrust are mapped to the same button: hold the button to thrust forward, and tap the button to shoot (which also has recoil, giving you a bit of backwards momentum). You've got to find a ballance between thrusting and shooting. As the game progresses, there are some nice enemy designs and some really cool powerups to keep things interesting (and colorful).

In March this year (2020) some developers at Itchio including Vector Hat offered their games for free to help gamers get through the Corona lockdown and I downloaded a bunch of them, mostly shmups. R-COIL was the first game I tried since I recently played another Asteroids game and had seen the title before. To compete with others I later bought the game at Steam. R-Coil is a simple little Asteroids inspired game with vector graphics and a retro style view. It looks fine and some of the later weapons have some really nice visual effects. A game like this is all about gameplay and it offers something unique. You only have one button to shoot and to fly. When you shoot there's massive recoil, hence the name. At first the control will feel awkward and maybe even wrong. However if you give it enough time you'll learn how to control the ship. Once you've mastered flying the ship and its weapons it becomes a real joy. You can use a controller or a mouse. When using a mouse moving left/right rotates the ship. This would make it possible to use an arcade spinner controller as well but you would need to assign a left mouse button to one of the buttons. There are 6 levels each consisting of multiple waves with increasing difficulty. Every few waves there's a checkpoint. The waves are procedurally generated with some being partially scripted e.g. the first wave is always the same 3-5 yellow saucers coming from the left but the position they sprout from differs. With most waves you don't know which enemy or enemies you'll get and where they'll sprout from. So you always have to be battle ready. There are ship/weapon upgrades that will appear as text on the screen moving from one side to the other you can pick up by flying through it. You'll have to learn the abbreviations because only some of them are beneficial in the situation you'll find yourself in. Once shot the text will slow down. When you don't want a certain upgrade you can shoot the text a few times and often a new one will appear. If you just want to play through the game there's a stress free mode that will let you continue when your ship is destroyed. This mode is super easy until you get spawn continuously in the middle of some bug enemies. It takes some patience to get through that part. Personally I think it would have been more fun to have a mode where you can respawn at your last checkpoint indefinitely. That would allow you to practice tough waves and completing the game would still be a fair challenge. There are two multiplayer modes, coop and duel which support a local game and Steam's remote play together. Duel can be played with bots as well. Here's a game I recorded: https://youtu.be/p8b2cwilTk4

Preso da attacco di nostalgia di remake anni 80, da appassionato pluridecennale collezionista retrogames, mi sono cimentato tra un horror ed un altro, tra un fps ed un altro, una pausa con questo clone moderno di asteroids. Lo sviluppatore pensando di fare cosa buona e giusta da perfetto nerd fighetto, che non ne ha indovinata una buona in questo indie, ha eliminato proprio il principio di estrema giocabilità, pur nella sua semplicità di esecuzione, ovvero, divincolati, spara, e fuggi, tra asteroidi e navicelle aliene ostili. Ovvero, concentrando in un solo click del mouse destro, il movimento e la potenza di fuoco, moscia e sterile come una eiaculazione di un uomo attivo di 87 anni, con il risultato di creare un disastro nella gestione della navicella Tra le qualità del titolo, tutte estremamente negative, una riflessione sul bordo schermo perimetro di gioco, che a differenza del suo illustre predecessore ha confini non varcabili. Rispetto ad Asteroids che permetteva il movimento della navicella senza confini, a 360 gradi e di uscire dalla visuale del monitor per apparire dall'altro lato, r-coil ha una varietà di esecuzione limitata all'interno di una area circoscritta, che amplifica in questo arcade ancor più, il già deleterio feedback frustrante del gameplay, facendo terminare nella discarica virtuale questo R-coil dopo pochi minuti. Taken by attack of nostalgia of remake 80s, from passionate decades of retro collector retrogames, I have tried between a horror and another, between a fps and another, a break with this modern clone of asteroids. The developer thinking to do good and right thing as perfect nerd cool, who did not guess a good in this indie, has eliminated the principle of extreme gameplay, although in its simplicity of execution, that is, divinculati, shoot, and escape, between asteroids and alien ships hostile. That is, concentrating in a single right mouse click, the movement and firepower, soft and sterile as an ejaculation of an active man of 87 years, with the result of creating a disaster in the management of the ship Among the qualities of the title, all extremely negative, a reflection on the edge of the game’s perimeter screen, which unlike its illustrious predecessor has boundaries that are not passable. Compared to Asteroids that allowed the movement of the spacecraft without borders, 360 degrees and out of the view of the monitor to appear on the other side, r-coil has a limited variety of execution within a limited area, that amplifies in this arcade even more, the already frustrating feedback of the gameplay, making end in the virtual dump this R-coil after a few minutes.