Space Fat: To the Core

Developer/Publisher: winknowgames THE PREMISE Starting in space you battle your way thru the various layers of the atmosphere, working your way down to the planet and then attempt to make it to the planet's core. The is a 2D vertically scrolling shooter with platform and some puzzle solving thrown in for good measure. THE GAME Your lasers double as your retros. As you progress downward you can either land on the many platforms, or shoot them and continue downward, being careful to avoid asteroids and the like. You can destroy them with your lasers, and indeed must if you are to progress. Destroy platforms that is. Also floating in space are what look like gold coins. What they're doing in space is not explained. Along the sides of the screen you will see doors with platforms under them. Be sure not to destroy the platforms before you go inside. Some doors require a key to enter. As you descend you will come across Blockades. You destroy the locks on either side with your laser to proceed, but things then ramp up considerably, with hordes of things to destroy and coins to collect. MYSTERY CUBES Inside each room is at least one small cube. Shooting it a few times will unlock a gift which will descend down to you. This appears to be all random as far as what you get. A power-up. A Key. Extra Lives. Increased Health. Some crazy add-ons to your ship that make strange noises. So far that's a sample of what I've found inside. When you see a cube floating above a Blockade be sure not to destroy the Blockade before you shoot open the box, because if you do your ship will descend out of range of the mystery goody. SOUND EFFECTS Goofy and a lot of fun. CONTROLS You can choose to use a Controller or Keyboard. I use my Logitech Xbox 360 Controller, which works fine. A Button = Laser X Button = Jump Y and X Buttons = various power-ups. When you find a new weapon or power-up inside a cube you will be told via text which Button or Key activates it. WACKY BUT COOL INTERFACE You don't use your mouse. That would be too expected. When you start a game move your ship over to the broken elevator and jump up and shoot the elevator button with your laser. That opens the door. You enter and the game's on. You pause, not by hitting the P key. How mundane that would be. You press Escape instead. That's where you will find such things as Continue and Save and Exit. Say you wish to continue. You move your ship and shoot the word Continue. It then falls to the floor. You move down to it and shoot it again, and a continuing you will go. SOUND EFFECTS If you hear the sound of glass breaking then your ship has been hit. Too many hits and you will hear "oh" exclaimed in a rather humorous manner. I've had some things added on to my ship that make some truly odd noises. VISUAL CUES Life Bar and such In the upper left will be a series of Hearts. That's your Life Bar. The more hearts the better. If you have additional ships they will be displayed beneath the Hearts. In the upper right is your score, I guess, represented by x and then a number. It goes up with each coin you collect. I've reached as high as x486. Also on the right is a Life Bar as well, but that's for the end bosses. It's empty most of the time, but when it suddenly fills up then the end of level boss battle has arrived. I can get past the first one no problem, but the second, Space Station Hope, is much harder. I haven't figured it out yet, although I can now last much longer by moving left and right in a pattern opposite to the pattern of the first and third waves of enemy fire. NEGATIVES The interface between the game and the Steam Client denies you the ability to take screenshots. I also could not capture play footage. THE POSITIVES Everything else! CONCLUSION This game is highly addictive and a lot of fun. If you like retro style 2D vertical scrolling shooters, you'll like this one too. Highly recommend!

Space Fat: To the Core is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro pixel platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This shovelware platformer/shooter hybrid is particularly badly made but does feature a less commonly used form factor as you shoot downwards in a kind of "endless faller" game style. Novel ideas for games don't cancel out terrible implementation quality, unfortunately. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. The implementation here is of such poor quality, the developer couldn't work out how to make the game display in fullscreen, it only runs in a window. There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers. The game features no proper level design or game/story flow/plot, as they opted to try to use samey repetitive procgen algorithms as a substitute for adding such content to the game, to avoid doing the important job of level/map design. As a result, the game doesn't actually have any content worth mentioning, just endless, boring, repetitive, soulless algorithmically generated sameyness. Developers must learn that procedural generation is not an acceptable substitute for content. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Space Fat: To the Core is relatively cheap at $3 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.