The Battle of Aurinoxia

No me gustó. Tenés que disparar como 10 veces a los enemigos más débiles. Las balas es como que ni hacen daño. No tiene ese estilo retro que intenta tener.

Not even fun in a "so bad it's good" way. It's just... bad. Enemies sometimes spawn from behind you, which is frustrating and feels like cheap design. The enemy patterns are laughably lazy. Most of the time they just fire a straight wall of bullets and stop, so the "strategy" becomes waiting it out, shooting a bit, and going back to a corner. There's no flow, no rhythm, no intensity. All the things that make SHMUPs great are just missing. Worse yet, there's zero originality here. The game doesn't try to bring anything new, and even the basics are poorly done. It feels like someone copied a SHMUP template, tweaked a few things, and called it a day. Visually, it's just as uninspired. The art is bland and forgettable, and even retro shooters from 20 or 30 years ago have more style and personality than this. There's no visual identity, nothing that makes the game stand out or even look particularly finished. The soundtrack is probably the only part I can say is halfway decent. A few synth tracks are kind of cool, but everything else falls apart fast. The sound design is rough, especially the boss voiceovers. They're so awful that I ended up muting the entire game just to keep going. This game simply needed a lot more time, testing, and creative thought before being put out there. It honestly feels like a student project, and as it stands, there's just no reason to play this.

The main mode is Story, which doesn’t actually have much of a story and doesn’t go beyond the premise of a lone protector fighting against a massive invading force. Still, it gives you the feeling that you’re just one pilot in a larger conflict, and friendly units will occasionally appear to help you for a few seconds. Then there’s Stage Select, although you first have to beat a stage in Story mode to unlock it, and Survival mode, where you face random enemy waves and bosses. All modes let you choose between five difficulty settings, which affect enemy strength and the frequency of power-ups. The power-up you’ll see most often, and the most important one, upgrades your main gun. Unlike most games where a weapon can only be upgraded a few times before additional power-ups become useless and merely increase your score, here you can continue boosting your firepower many times. It starts with basic forward fire, then gains additional shots in all four directions, eventually expanding to include diagonal fire as well. Your firepower carries over between stages, so staying alive is important. Even so, you can quickly recover some of it after dying because your ship drops a few power-ups when destroyed. The same applies to health, which depends on your shield strength and can be restored by collecting another power-up. Other power-ups provide bombs that can be triggered at any time to destroy everything around you, or nukes that activate immediately upon collection and wipe out the entire screen. Two additional abilities become available over time, tied to a hidden cooldown: a powerful blast that destroys everything on screen and a defensive shell that repairs your shield while granting a temporary extra layer of protection. The six stages are largely similar, all set against a space backdrop, though the enemy types change enough to keep things somewhat interesting. Most enemies require several shots to destroy, and because the play area is fairly small, there isn’t much room to maneuver and avoid incoming lasers. This becomes especially frustrating during the boss fights at the end of each stage, which have a tendency to cause cheap deaths that leave you with no realistic way to avoid taking damage. Despite these frustrations, the game can be completed in a single sitting. There’s no additional content waiting afterward, and the only thing left to do is grind achievements. Unfortunately, they’re excessive and a waste of time. Finishing the story barely makes a dent in the achievement list, forcing you to spend countless hours replaying the same stages over and over again.

Let's start with the positive parts. A lot of effort went into the graphcs ans music, the game looks very polished and bullets are very visible. The soundtrack gets a lot of european composers vibes, and it sounds fantastic, making the game look and sound great. The control is responsive, and the devs correctly avoided getting into the common pitfall of adding inertia to the ship - thumbs up for that. However, at it's core, the game is supposed to work as as shmup and that's where it doesn't click. All enemies are like sponges, they absorb a lot of shoots before giving up - even the puniest of enemies. And no matter how powered up you are, you still have to shoot a lot on them and the power up is almost pointless. The mine fields in the game lack any strategy - they explose at random and the blast range is exxagerated. Would have been cooler to have a chain reaction to help clear out the screen, or award some bonus from navigating through them. And talking about navigating, the game is more like a traditional methodic shmup that tries to behave like a bullet hell by filling the screen with bullets. But without the careful consideration of the genre, so that the hitbox is huge and it's nearly impossible to navigate through enemy shots simply because the ship's hit box can't fit between them. The game also makes no use of the contrast of bullet speeds, to use slow fixed bullets to trap the player while the faster directional ones force movement and makes the player develop strategies like bullet streaming while avoiding the slowe, fixed bullets. All enemies will shoot downwards and, the few enemies that do not, mostly do it in multiple directions to avoid the player from attacking them from the back ot the side - probably a feedback from early acces that it made the game easier. The only enemy that tries to fire directionally at the player still does it in 45 degress increments, so not really directional. The bosses exhacerbate those issues by adding undodgeable atttacks - the sklill required is to survive the basic attacks with enough shields to go through the one's we can't dodge and then survive enough to get the shield items to repeat the process. And it was really weird that once beating the boss that the stage is not over - there's a check point we need to touch to end the stage, which is really awkard and a first in the genre. The power up, shield and bomb items are generously available, to make the game a bit on the easier side, instead of going back to the design board and plan patterns that challenge the player. N-11 made it clear that the game was inspired by a Godot tutorial, but I wish they were inspired by Truxton, Aleste, Dodonpachi, GRaze Counter or many other shmups that define the genre. The way it is, it feels like the goal was to do it differently just for the sake of being different. For a game that was on early access for an year, it does seem a missed opportunity to improve over a solid foundation. The game has the looks and music to compete with other contemporary games from the genre - mission accomplished there. But the gameplay itself is lacking and it's surprising that with so many people in the shmup community available for feedback that none brought it up to help the game get to the next step. I'll look forward to a next shmup N-11 does because their production values are that good. But I hope it's a step forward from what we see in the Battle Aurinoxia. ps: regarding the plot, it's disturbing that the game proudly presents the player as the bad guy in a colonization project and our goal is to drive the natives from their home land. Like, if this was based on Avatar, we'd play as the marines supporting the miners exploiting Pandora.

Very fun! I dig it 👍