Stray Shot

An intoxicating take on the twin-stick shooter, Stray Shot introduces a level of strategy you don’t see often in this type of game. Just feels good to play across the board.

Typical very simple, hard to master arcade score attack/chaser. The gimmick of missed shots turning into bullets is unique, straightforward yet effective, with more depth than you'd expect at a glance, especially as spawn position depends on where you shoot. There is an emphasis on strategy, timing, risk taking, aim, positioning and maneuvering. Most of what you want out of an arena twinsticker. Clean gameplay and design. Fluid albeit the tank can be a bit slow and turning can be a little jarring. Fun, enjoyably frustrating and addictive. Quite a bit more variety and content than i expected. You'd think that the gameplay is just infinite score chasing that gets repetitive, but instead it has a very strategical and customizable bullet hell experience, the goals are fair and give you enough motivation to pursue, with the mastery goals being reasonably challenging. Punkcake knows their game design well, once again. They are there to have fun making small games and refining game designing as their mission's focus. Can't go wrong with a philosophy centered around good gameplay. Don't let the somewhat corny trailer turn you away!

The first ever Push Your Luck SHMUP!! Like with other Punkcake games you’ve got a mashup of mechanics that turns the familiar into the unfamiliar. Stray Shot is an arena shooter where your worst enemy… is you. In Stray Shot you won’t be collecting points that are dropped from defeated enemies and enemies don’t have a fixed point value for being defeated. Instead, each Arena has 5 enemy ranks that indicate both their rarity (think common to legendary) and their multiplier. A blue enemy is the most common and worth N(1) points. N being the population of enemies in the arena. If that blue enemy is the only one in the arena it’s worth 1 point. If there are a hundred enemies in the arena that same enemy is now worth 100 points! With every shot you fire at the arena wall being converted into a new enemy, you’ll have to balance being super accurate while intentionally adding in enemies to keep the population high so you can score more points. Since you are both the person shooting, dodging, and adding enemies you’ll only have yourself to blame when the game over lights flash. Good Luck, you’ll need it

Important note: it says I played for 0.6 hours, but that doesn't count the multiple more hours that I played this game while offline. I almost exclusively played this when my power went out for a week. A fun, arcadey, score attack, twinstick experience with a multitude of game modes, and with each level having a different set of enemies that requires a different attack strategy for getting a good score. The music is also pretty good, and it feels like there's some sort of system that makes the music match the rhythm of you killing enemies. I almost didn't like the game, because I didn't realize you didn't have to use the arrow keys to shoot, when playing with a keyboard, until like half an hour into playing. The mouse apparently also works. It was probably the most fun I had playing games, of the games I had installed, when my power went out, about a week ago (the other options being most of the other Punkcake games & some other fun games that I already enjoy playing, like some roguelike I'm already experienced with & some puzzle games) The main gimmick of the game is that you can kinda self-regulate your difficulty, to an extent, in order to get a higher score. You can, to an extent, control how many enemies are on the screen at once, and when you kill an enemy, you get more points for every other enemy on the screen, so you can play it safe and limit the amount of enemies, getting a moderate score, or you can go sicko mode and fill the whole screen with enemies, racking up a huge score.

Only 28 reviews for a game this good is criminal. Basically a perfect arcade game.

Very cool, very original idea. If you like twin stick shooters and experimental projects, this one will be a treat for you!