Zerograve

AMAZING game! I love it! Just over 1/2 done with the campaign and have loved every moment of it so far. 100% recommended!

Shorter but sweet game. It's not particularly hard but I found it fun and the unique ideas for the bosses were cool. Worth the money.

To summarize my feelings, this 6DoF game was shorter than expected but great while it lasted. Many games made by just one person will do one thing pretty well but lack the width and depth which a team of creators can accomplish. In the best of such cases, as this game demonstrates, doing one thing well can be amazing if that one thing is fun. At the start, you'll have basic lasers and rockets, then you level up with points from defeating foes and found as secrets. Each level unlocks new stuff or adds a small cumulative benefit ranging from more health and ammo to selectable upgrades that help form a build. There's very little penalty for dying and you can even die but then level up, becoming stronger for the next attempt. Primary weapons function as good shotguns, small-area bursts, a short-range chainsaw and other weak but interesting stuff. Secondary weapons include homing missiles, zappy orbs, a deadly rifle, large area spreads and the powerful auto turret. Ammo management is nicely simplified; primary weapons have unlimited energy only held back by firing speed, while secondaries are fed by a shared ammo pool balanced by having different costs to use. Before entering a level, you choose a loadout from two sets of one primary and one secondary, along with up to two upgrades such as increased fire rate, more ammo or shields, and eventually regeneration from dealing damage or causing destroyed foes to explode. You also freely set difficulty (I was always on Normal except for a particularly rough level) or customize everything: damage taken, enemy strength and aggression, pickups and even slowing game speed to 60%. The main game consists of a couple dozen maze levels with light escalating combat difficulty. Enemy ships are varied and fun to fight and eventually get interesting powers such as bolts that explode into shards or tripwire beams. Four boss levels provide tough and unique fights with the ability to temporarily break their weapons. There's also a testing area where tanky enemies don't shoot back but continue to respawn and you're provided all the data you could want to compare weapons and builds. On the other hand, the very minimal plot seems to have borrowed all of its ideas, combining the super agent fighting an AI invader like in Retrovirus and waking up a frozen pilot in a crisis like in Overload, then giving quick progress updates before each level to explain the surroundings. Levels tend to be short and easy to navigate, though semi-sneaky shortcuts and secrets are everywhere. Unlike a lot of 6DoF games, there's no option to save within a level, which was fine because so few of them are tough enough where that would be a problem. Two “Extra Levels” provide 40 wave survival challenges; the Factory is a basic multi-zone area that feels good to conquer, while the Train area has hazards to avoid as well and was less fun. I wish there were more of these with better variety, like a cage match with deadly walls. My biggest complaint for this game was being reminded of the ugly dungeons of NeonXSZ, where every wall is a flat surface with the bare minimum of texturing. At least this game has some color variation; the game description calls them biomes but the only real difference between areas is when they add hazards like trains to avoid, or a moving wall of death. Overall though, this is a great game with engaging and tense combat. Just … buy it cheap.