Steel Rain

I'm at a loss to how I'd describe Steel Rain. It's got classic side-scrolling shoot-em-up action, at its core. Between missions, your ship levels up skills and buys upgrades. After you finish levels (planets), you gain access to a city placement resource-gathering tool. It doesn't work flawlessly; it works often enough you forgive it for the few shortcomings you encounter. In my Dariusburst review, I criticized that game's failure to mix MMO and shmup compellingly. Steel Rain, on the other hand, does it well. Quests and planetary sieges provide randomized fleets to take out and earn extra money. Each mission attempt, not just mission, is unique: some enemies spawn at different times, in different numbers, from different locations. The action could've quickly gotten stale, but Steel Rain's gameplay lubricates the long-term experience as you grind into late game. It makes grinding feel like less of a tiresome chore, thanks to ten difficulty settings. Getting to the late game is where the city-building and research trees come into play. As you develop your acquired planets, your income shoots up and you unlock helpful research upgrades. Most of the upgrades I found inapplicable to my style of play, a roadblock to get the stuff I actually wanted (T2/T3 Drones, Steel Citadels). Switching Research production to Production ...uh, production is an option once you've fully researched all tech. The menus are plain, and just effective enough to not totally piss you off. The music, sound effects, and some of the visuals are forgettable and underwhelming. These are minor qualms, however, compared to the rest of the game. Steel Rain is a shmup whose innovative idea is numbers. You don't grind high scores exactly; you don't need to, really. You grind your ship's level and credit amount to astronomical (no pun intended) heights. You rebuild human civilization one new planet at a time. You upgrade your ship into a catastrophic one-man army, mission by mission, quest by quest, skill by skill. It's a slower, RPG-like progression that fits well enough for a recommendation. Steel Rain could use improvement via a sequel, but the foundation laid here is solid.

pew pew pew 3/10

basically this is a better version of sky mercenaries. not a great game but certainly good enough to pick up during a sale. it's a shoot'em up and it tries to incorporate elements of other genres. sadly while trying to be a bit of everything it kind of fails to be truly good at anything. apart from the usual part of shooting enemies and upgrading your ship there's colony building, research, production, skills, quests, some other stuff i forgot and a level editor for you to create your own missions and download & play other players' missions. graphics and sound are pretty unspectacular while the music is pretty good. at least in parts. the other game elements offer some distraction from the shooting business but at the end of the day they are just a rather unengaging because-we-can bonus to the main game. however the main game is pretty solid. buy all sorts of upgrades for your ship, unlock new skills, research new abilities, use three different fire modes for maximum carnage and there are 6 (?) different bullet types (or colors) with different effects. red boosts your firepower while blue boosts your defence, with yellow you get more money drops to afford your next upgrade and green turns your enemies' tears into hull repair for your ship. there are a lot of options for you to test and explore to find the best match for each mission. probably the biggest plus of this game is the very adaptive difficulty setting. there are four base difficulties from easy to legendary and each of them can be fine tuned from level 0 to 10. so easy level 0 is so easy that literally everybody can beat it while legendary level 10 is simply impossible to beat. at least until MUCH later in the game. but if you get there you get a really good reward payout per mission to help with the xp grinding and credits farming. i finished the game on regular difficulty in about 7 or 8 hours and that included replaying a lot of missions to farm credits and grind xp. getting the game 100% completed took a total of 23 (!) hours, even when grinding as fast as possible and replaying the most rewarding missions for like 2000 times. so if you want to go for the 100% you have a whole weekend of work ahead. i liked and quite enjoyed this game but after this marathon i've really had enough for a lifetime.

A very well-built sidescroller game with integrated RPG elements and in-game mods that make this game somewhere between modern and classic in this genre. I'm enjoying this game so far and will continue to do so. This is a relaxing game and a good way to take a break from triple A games.

Sometimes buggy, often confusing, always fun.

Ive always enjoyed sidescrollers, I was raised with R type 3 and Gradius so this one's a great addition. The music is thouroughly enjoyable and adds a lot to the experience (no soundtrack yet available??) The customization also add a lot to rerun and replay value as the playstyle can be altered quite dramatically from one bout to the next. Not epic, but highly recommended.

I really love this game. It basically is a shootem up with a base building setup like Masters of Orion when you beat a planet. I feel like this idea could be expanded for infinite replayability. You gradually become OP and change the difficulty to match until the screen becomes a hail of bullets and everything is constantly exploding. It is awesome. It has periodic base attacks which generate defense missions but you can build a defense station and completely ignore it for a minor resource hit if you wish. It has local co op where one player controls the drone. I did enjoy playing as the drone while my brother played. Being invincible, I could block bullets to create paths and kill hard to get to enemies without fear of death. Most people don't like that style of co op but I definitely do. The stage editor is a lot of fun as well especially with the expeditions expansion. You can create some cool multitiered stages. I personally enjoyed them. ****Note**** It initially hard crashed my computer at seemingly random intervals. I ran in Windows compatibility mode for Windows XP Service Pack 3 and as administrator and this problem no longer occurs. I suspect it is due to some incompatibility with AMD drivers given some post but I don't know for sure.

Meh

钢雨铁流，一个带策略要素的横版STG。虽然射击手感一般，但是你可以在STG里建设基地啊....

En lo personal, no considero que sea un juego muy divertido, o al menos esa ha sido mi impresión tras la primera partida que jugué. El alto contenido gráfico no parece adecuado para este tipo de juegos, donde tantos efectos de iluminación, objetos para recoger, obstáculos que esquivar y naves por destruir terminan siendo un poco confusos, al menos para mi limitada visión. Me resulta difícil jugar cómodamente este título.